


Silver Linings

by Leah_Red



Series: Voltron, but Better [1]
Category: Venom (Comics), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Lessened age difference, M/M, SHEITH - Freeform, Semi-realistic depictions of mental illness, Slow Burn, Venom AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:01:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 36,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23758777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leah_Red/pseuds/Leah_Red
Summary: Shiro lost a year of memories, with only the knowledge that he had to warn Earth about the Galra and help them find the super-weapon Voltron surviving. His right arm had been replaced with an ink-black simulacrum of his original limb and seemed to have a mind of it's own.What happened to him while he was captured? And will he really be able to lead the group tasked with saving the entire universe when there's a voice in his head demanding he rip out the throats of his enemies with his bare teeth?Only time would tell.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Series: Voltron, but Better [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1711558
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	1. The Rise of Voltron

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dreamicide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamicide/gifts).



> Don't watch Voltron, my girlfriend said. If you do, don't get invested, she added. Look what I went and did. It was both. This started out as a jokey sort of 'haha look it's our favorite media combined' and turned into 'oh god I have to fix this' faster than I realized.
> 
> Comments with notes about typos/missed editing/ect are always welcome!
> 
> Enjoy.

Violet-red light. A sickly feeling of weightlessness. Sudden pain as a chunk of ice drawn into the tractor beam smashed into his helmet - 

Shiro gasped and coughed as he finally came to his senses. The air caught in his throat, sour and cloying. His arms were bound behind him and a cold hand grasped the back of his spacesuit’s collar to keep him upright.

Tall creatures – People? Aliens?, he asked himself – stood over him, eyes on a large screen at the front of the room. Their voices were grating and unintelligible but clearly a language of some sort.

The one addressing the screen turned around briefly. They waved their hand towards Shiro dismissively, seeing he was awake, and turned back to the large screen. Before he could even try to respond, something hard and cold was pressed just above his ear. A swift shock of electricity bolted through him, blurring his vision and wrenching a pained scream from his throat. Even after the sharp pain faded there was a dull throb on his temple in time with his heartbeat.

“...primitive scientists. I don’t think they know anything useful.” The rasping alien tongue was still what he heard, but somehow Shiro knew exactly what the one in charge was saying and the tone it conveyed.

“Take them back to the main fleet for interrogation.” 

Even if he was now somehow able to understand them, Shiro knew it wasn’t an act of kindness that had made the alien give him the ability to interpret their speech. If it wasn’t to make this ‘interrogation’ easier it was most likely to inspire fear…

Wait. ‘Them?’ Shiro looked to the side and saw two other suited figures. There was no chance they were anyone but the Holts. 

“The druids will find out what they know,” the voice from the screen continued. 

“Please, we come from a peaceful planet!” Shiro shouted before he could stop himself. “We mean you no harm!” If he could understand them, surely they could get what he was saying right back. “We’re unarmed!”

Before the last syllable was even out of his mouth another sharp blow knocked him to the cold floor of the unfamiliar ship. 

He was aware of being moved, dragged across the ground. When Shiro could finally sort through the pain well enough to open his eyes, his first sight was one of his crew being marched along behind him by a hulking figure.

More alien voices met his ears. Almost all of them were different and yet he could still understand them. The dissonance of what he heard through his ears and what was somehow interpreted in his mind made the headache pounding at his skull even worse.

“Look, they brought in another one.”

“Where? Who is it?”

“Over there. It’s another one.”

Eyes of more shapes and sizes than he had ever imagined stared at him through slits in cell doors on one side of the hallway. When he glanced to his other side, unsuccessfully trying to clear his head, the view through a grimy window stunned him into alertness. 

Rows upon rows, stories upon stories of the same windowed halls, all looking down a massive shaft that ran through the ship. Shiro stared out in awed horror.

“This cell is registered for another being.” A robotic voice didn’t break him out of his trance. “Readings say it may or may not be harmful to these aliens but there is no evidence of a life form inside.” The hand dragging Shiro along lifted him slightly. There was a moment of what seemed like hesitation before the door slid open and they threw him inside anyway. The door hissed shut immediately to leave him in almost total darkness. 

Shiro didn’t get up off the floor just yet. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath of fetid air. He was alive. So was his crew. And whoever had captured them didn’t seem intent on disposing of them just yet. When he opened his eyes and got to his feet, still in pain but doing his best to deal with the situation, the barely lit cell was easier to navigate. 

There was minimal furnishings, of course. A metal shelf, barely wide enough to call a bunk, took up most of the wall on one side. Across from that was what he could only assume was a basic ‘waste disposal’ unit. That was where most of the stink in the cell originated from. 

Only one thing about the bare enclosure really puzzled Shiro. Where the back wall met the ceiling were some air vents, but something dripping and viscous was blocking them. It was dark enough in color to almost be invisible. Maybe something was growing in the air circulation system? he thought to himself.

“How pathetic would that be,” he mumbled, imagining getting taken prisoner by hostile aliens and then dying because his jail cell was cut off from breathable air. He braced himself on the bunk to be able to reach up and scrape it away. 

Tendrils of the mysterious ooze beat him to the punch. Before he could react, Shiro’s hand was wrapped in black and more surged forward out of the vents to cover his face, working into his mouth and nose. 

Once again his vision went dark.

*

ONE YEAR LATER

*

Keith stared up at the ceiling of his shack of a home. His eyebrows slowly drew together into a glare and under the thin covers his hands balled into fists. 

“AAGH!!” Interrupting the silence, Keith lashed out and slammed his fist into the closest wall. He sat up and shoved his hands into his thick hair with another groan.

No sleep. Again.

He slid his feet off the bed and on to the floor. The splintered hardwood was only barely softened by threadbare carpets dirty with a layer of ever-present grit. His hand, still tingling from uselessly punching the wall, reached up to grip at his shirt in the center of his chest. 

Something had drawn him out into the desert a year ago. Something giving him a sense of purpose, keeping him going when he had nothing else. And whatever it was, for the last goddamn year, it had royally screwed over his sleep schedule. 

“It’s tomorrow, I know it’s tomorrow,” Keith huffed. He shuffled his way through the dark cabin and out the door, glaring in the direction of the mountains. “It’s fucking _tomorrow!”_ he shouted. There was no answer, of course. He could only feel an anxious sense of urgency nestled in his chest keeping him from sleep.

The desert air, cold in the middle of the night, drove him inside. He flipped the lights on but the sight of his cork board made him turn them right back off. Now was not the time he wanted to be reminded of all the work he had put into exploring and researching those stupid lion carvings. A folded tarp caught his eye on the floor underneath the board. He kept it around to cover the leaky roof whenever the rare rainstorm blew in, but as irritated as he was, it would do just as well to cover up the infuriating wall.

Keith just tacked up the first corner of the tarp when the movement caused a yellow sticky note to flutter to the floor. He paused to pick it up and felt his chest tighten. _It’s killing me when you’re away._ His eyes hurried to move away from the words and stick it back away under the tarp. 

“Don’t even start to think about him,” he told himself sternly. It only took a few moments more to finish putting up the tarp and that was almost too long.

“Much better.” Keith dusted his hands off with a pleased nod. The urge to do _something_ was still there, but at least that brief sense of accomplishment took that manic energy away.

Since sleep was out of the question, he might as well embrace the rest of his night. His hoverbike was fueled up and ready to go for whatever was going to happen the next day. No use tinkering around with that and risk creating an issue he couldn’t fix in time. He had also loaded the bike with approximate coordinates to where his mysterious guidance wanted him to be. Next to the bed were his cleanest clothes, folded neatly with his knife on top. Just as useful as any gun or blaster in the right hands. With a sigh he realized there was nothing to do but kill time. He kicked open a small cooler to grab a bottle of water. Might as well be hydrated in case the worst happened and he was stuck away from help.

Keith eventually worked up the effort to fold the futon bed back into a couch to lie down and stare at the ceiling. Everything that was happening would be so much less frustrating if he actually knew what the hell was going on. He closed his eyes and imagined the stars above him, picking out constellations and asterisms from memory, and was shocked when he opened his eyes blearily to mid-morning sunlight. 

The rest of the morning went by in fits and starts. An hour would pass in what felt like minutes before the next hour felt like an entire day. He even found himself trying to pick up and tidy around his little shack, though that mostly involved picking things up, walking around in a circle trying to figure out where to put it, and then placing it right back down where it came from.

Keith wasn’t sure how much longer he could deal with just piddling around, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the house yet. It wasn’t until the sun dipped just below the horizon that something inside him shifted. 

“Time to go.” 

Kitted up and ready, Keith tied a bandana around the lower half of his face before heading out to his hoverbike. The power coupling was unhitched with a quick _snap._ The sound of the craft powering up made him feel better than anything had in weeks. He finally felt like he was really _doing_ something now and not just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Speeding through the still-warm twilight air was just the release he needed to celebrate that.

Without warning, a bright light zoomed above his head. Something was headed to earth and would land in the direction he was moving.

“Holy shit… Yeah, this is the right way.” He glanced at the map on the hoverbike console. Not far. But this close to the Garrison, there was no way he would get in fast enough to find out what was going on before the military showed up. Good thing he had a contingency plan. A flick of a switch shifted open a panel on each wing. It was no laser cannon, but with some strategic aiming, the tiny bombs loaded inside could cause enough of a distraction to get him close enough to figure out what was going on.

Keith pushed his bike to move even faster. The sooner he got there and got to business, the better.

*

The re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere was a lot rougher than Shiro expected. The terminal was flashing an even brighter red than normal. He bit back curses when turbulence almost threw him to the floor of the tiny shuttle. Only his right arm grabbing the side of the chair in front of the control panel kept him from falling and injuring his head, again. 

He tried not to think too hard about his arm, maneuvering himself into the seat and buckling himself in for what would inevitably be a crash landing. The limb felt like his, and all sensations _seemed_ normal, but instead of being covered in his own skin, the arm was glossy black, almost shiny, with a metallic undertone coming up from underneath. Trying to think too hard about it only made his head throb – and besides, he had a crashing space shuttle to deal with.

Shiro did his best to force the ship into a shallower descent, but the best he could do was direct himself to a flat plain of desert rock. Alarms blaring and lights flashing all around him, he closed his eyes and braced for impact.

For it being the second instance in a relatively short period of time that he dealt with being exploded, Shiro didn’t feel too terrible. The harness he had strapped into had broken and he felt unusually heavy as he lay on the metal flooring of the shuttle. He knew he should get up, check his body for injuries, try to figure out where he had landed and try to get his message to human authorities, but… The rush of air through a cracked-open hatch made his head spin. How long had it been since he had breathed in the atmosphere of his home planet? It felt rich and heady compared to the odd mix that kept all the prisoners and hostages alive on the Galra ship.

Shiro felt his body being moved but couldn’t offer any resistance. Hot, dry air washed over him before it was replaced with air that was cold and filtered. It helped bring him back to his senses just in time for wide straps to be fastened into place and strap him onto a medical gurney.

“H-hey! What are you doing!?” Bright lights obscured the faces behind the hazmat suits that towered over him. Shiro struggled uselessly against the restraints.

“Calm down, Officer Shirogane,” commanded one of the suits, vaguely familiar voice muffled from behind the layers of PPE. “We just need to keep you quarantined until we run some tests on you.” If Shiro didn’t know any better, it was almost like he didn’t expect someone tied down like that to resist.

Shiro shook his head to clear it further and get a hurried look around the hastily propped up tent. “You have to listen to me!” The carefully thought out warnings and arguments he had gone over again and again slipped away in panic as the situation spiraled out of his control. “They destroy worlds!” Bucking harder at the straps, Shiro found himself shouting desperately, “Aliens are coming!”

“Do you know how long you’ve been gone?” The voice had the tone of a disappointed parent and the fact that they were totally ignoring his warning was not part of the plan.

“I don’t know. Months? Years?” Even if he had been able to keep track, why did that even matter? “Look, there’s no time.” No matter which person he looked at, there was no way to see through the mask to try to make eye contact. A few kept taking turns to pass sensors over his body, not even acknowledging that he was trying to speak to them. They were treating him like he was nothing but a _specimen._ A sudden rush of anger at the thought nearly made him shout in frustration before he fought it back, clenching his fist so hard he felt muscles bulge and joints crack under his strange skin.

“Aliens are coming here for a weapon,” he growled out through clenched teeth. “They’re probably on their way. They’ll _destroy_ us. We have to find Voltron!”

One of the suited men spoke up and cut him off. “Sir, take a look at this.” They hovered over his right arm. “It appears his arm has been replaced with some sort of… organic prosthetic.”

Shiro clenched his fist again. “I’m right here!” he burst out. “Stop it with the science shit and _listen to me!”_

“Put him under until we know what that thing is and what it can do,” commanded the voice in charge.

“No, no, nonono-” Shiro twisted his shoulders and tried again to work out some way to escape. “Don’t put me under! NO! There’s no time!!” He did his best to strain away from the hands trying to drug him but it was useless, hopeless - 

**RIPBITEDEVOURTEARCONSUMEBLOODBLOOD _BLOOD_**

Shiro gasped as the rush of violent thoughts poured through him only to be cut off by the bite of a needle. Cold sedatives surged through his body, aided by his pounding heartbeat. He could feel angry and frustrated tears heat up his eyes before the drug-induced haze finally put him under.

*

The bombs went off without a hitch, luring away the security detail around the tent just in time for Keith to pull up and hide his speeder behind one of the many rock formations in the area. 

“Time to get down to business.” Keith tugged on the knot that held his bandana in place and rushed inside.

Forcing the outer airlock door open was child’s play, and the inner door opened with just the press of a button. Of course there were other people inside. Worry flashed through his mind seeing them in full on protective gear, but it was too late now. They went down without a fight. Keith almost felt bad for them.

Keith jumped over a limp body to get to the center of the tent. Somebody was strapped down to a gurney, just about knocked out cold by either drugs or violence. He pulled his bandana down to look less threatening – he was there to rescue them, after all – when recognition struck him like a bolt of lightning. 

“Shiro?”

His hair was different and a scar marred the bridge of his nose, and Keith didn’t even want to think about why his arm looked like it had been dipped in asphalt, but… It was him. It was definitely him. Keith’s hand moved on it’s own as he reached forward to tilt that familiar face towards him. The movement made Shiro groan softly. So he _was_ alive. Keith didn’t know what he would do if he came all the way out here and found Shiro only for him to die a second time.

Keith cut the straps on the gurney free without a second thought. He should be able to get Shiro out of there and to the hoverbike before security realized the explosions were a decoy, and he knew paths through canyons and almost-caves that would hide them from a search until that last stretch to his home. Routes and plans were still running through his head as he lifted Shiro off the bed to carry him out.

“Nope. Nonono. Nuh-uh. I don’t fuckin’ think so.” The inner door slid open and let in somebody getting far too close to Keith’s personal space. Two more were backing him up in the hallway that lead to the outer door. _“I’m_ saving Shiro.” 

Keith just raised an eyebrow but didn’t stop the guy from lifting Shiro’s other arm around his shoulder. He would take what help he could get, for now.

“Who are you?” It seemed like an easy enough question at the time, and they followed along as Keith started to pull Shiro out of the Garrison tent.

“Who am I? Uh, the name’s Lance.” He met Keith’s eyes like that was supposed to mean something. “We were in the same class at the Garrison?” he continued, when Keith stayed silent.

“Really?” Keith did perk up a little then. It would be good to have help from somebody with a common background. “Are you an engineer?”

The look of offense was almost enough to make Keith laugh, if it were any other circumstance. “No, I’m a pilot!” Lance huffed, at least still doing his part to drag Shiro to safety. “We were, like, rivals. You know, Lance and Keith, neck and neck.”

“Oh, wait. I remember you.” Keith rolled his eyes, briefly letting go of Shiro with one hand to shove the outer door open. Were Lance’s two friends just dead weight or what? Jesus. “You’re a cargo pilot.”

“Not anymore. I’m fighter class now, thanks to _you_ washing out.”

“Well, congratulations. But now is not the fucking time.” Keith grit his teeth to keep from saying more or trying to pull Shiro completely out of Lance’s grip. Soon he would be on his bike and on the way to safety and these idiots could all run back to the Garrison like good little boys.

“Uh, do you mind if we catch a ride with you?” One of the two stragglers, the big guy, interrupted him while the other little one just hopped up on his speeder without even asking. At least Tiny was helping pull Shiro up on to the seat – until the entire back end of the idle bike smashed into the ground and nearly knocked everyone back on their asses.

“Is this thing gonna be big enough for all of us?” At least Tiny got the right idea.

“No.” Keith opened his mouth to tell them to shove off so he could take off already but the Garrison had other plans. The ATVs dispatched to investigate the explosions were on their way back, neon-bright headlights pointed right at the hoverbike. “Shit!” Well, no choice. He powered on the bike to get the hell out of Dodge without looking to see if everyone was holding on or not.

Keith ignored Tiny complaining about holding on to Shiro; as long as he didn’t drop him, he could complain all he wanted.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Lance shouted right in Keith’s ear.

“We could toss out some non-essential weight,” Keith growled as he twisted the throttle as far as it would physically allow. Any change in speed that actually happened wasn’t noticeable. For a brief moment, there was blessed silence. Lance got the hint.

“Okay, so that was an insult.” Lance did not get the hint. 

There! Keith saw one of the smaller rock formations coming up. The Garrison ATVs were tough, but they weren’t that tough. As overloaded as they were, Keith couldn’t make the maneuver he wanted unless he had some help.

“Big man, lean left!” With the extra weight as well as his grip on the controls, the bike was able to dodge out of the way of the formation in the nick of time. He couldn’t look back to confirm, but the sound behind him said that they knocked out at least one of the pursuing vehicles. 

“Big man, lean right!” Thank god he listened. With the extra momentum, the bike hopped to a lower level of a canyon next to them to lose even more of the ATVs trailing them. 

“Hey, there’s only one left!” the big guy cheered. “I think we’re in the clear – h-hey is that a cliff up ahead!?”

“Yep.” Keith grinned. They were in the home stretch. The chorus of ‘no’s’ behind him turned into cries of terror as the hoverbike launched over the edge of the cliff. For one brief moment they were all weightless until gravity took hold to drag the bike and all it’s riders back down to earth.

“Whatareyoudoingyou’regonnagetusallkilled!!!”

“Shut up and trust me!” Keith shouted right back at Lance. The engines had cooled down in their brief flight and with another twist of the throttle they were able to perform at their peak again, stopping the bike with what felt like just inches to spare. 

With that, unless they spit out any drones or wanted to try to fall to their deaths chasing after them, it seemed like the Garrison had given up.

Keith kept up as much speed as he could, until enough canyons and mesas separated the last of the Garrison ATVs to make him feel comfortable. He didn’t stop the hoverbike but he did at least let up on the speed enough to make communicating a little easier. 

“Everyone alive back there?”

“Yeah, just dandy,” Lance said faintly. Keith snorted out a laugh when he saw him draped over one of the wings.

“I think I swallowed a bug,” Big man volunteered after that. “Possibly up to three bugs.”

“It’s extra protein,” Tiny quipped right back. “Can somebody please help me hold this guy? I think my arms are gonna fall off…”

Keith glanced back and let the bike slow down even more, locking the controls and letting go of the handles. “Here. Let Shiro go and I’ll catch him. There’s enough room down here for you to sit behind us and make sure he doesn’t fall off.” He helped Tiny lower the larger man down until a warm and heavy weight rested against his back.

It was hard not to stare at the alien arm that the little guy helped secure around his waist. Under the guise of adjusting things, Keith let his fingers linger on the unfamiliar skin. It was warm, and it certainly felt like a normal arm, but there was something about it that was setting off alarm bells in his head. It was the same as when he ran into a rattlesnake and saw it rear back to strike. Even if he didn’t know that it was venomous, there was still an instinctual fear that warned him to back off. 

But it’s fine, he told himself. He turned his attention back to the handles of the hoverbike and sped up again. It was attached to Shiro, which meant it couldn’t be _all_ bad, and Keith was sure he would be able to explain that weird feeling away when he woke up.

Keith finally let himself really relax when he could finally see his shack of a home on the horizon. It wasn’t much, but it was his, and he was already determined not to let any of these visitors give him shit about it. He didn’t really have to worry about that, though. After Lance helped carry Shiro inside, with Tiny listening to Keith bark out directions on how to fold the temperamental futon out into a bed, everyone pretty much collapsed where they stood. 

“Waters are in the fridge,” Keith sighed. He sat next to the bed, ears pricked for the soft sound of Shiro’s breathing. 

When no one else got up to move it was Lance that got up to pass them out to everyone, even dropping a bottle on Keith’s lap before he flopped back down on the floor. 

“So you’re all from the Garrison, and you didn’t turn me in or try to stop me from rescuing Shiro.” Keith closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the side of the flimsy mattress. “Who are you again?”

Lance let out an exhausted grumble. “Lance. L-A-N-C-E. It’s really not that hard.”

“I’m Pidge,” Tiny volunteered from the other side of the room.

There was an expectant silence that drew out, waiting for the big guy to introduce himself. When Keith looked up to find out what was taking so long, he saw that Big guy was having himself a big sleep. 

“That’s Hunk. He’s usually a lot more talkative.” Lance fought off a yawn, leaning heavily against the wall. “Pidge calls him my voice of reason, but a voice of reason has to actually work for it to be called that, don’t you think?” he asked no one, voice distorted by another yawn.

Keith groaned and let his head fall back against the bed again. If Hunk was any more talkative than Lance he didn’t know if he ever wanted him to wake up. 

“He’s been asleep for a long time,” Keith said quietly. 

“It’s probably fine.” Pidge’s soft voice nearly startled him to his feet. He didn’t expect to be answered, after living out in the desert and having only himself for company. “I’ve seen Garrison medical techs use sedatives on people before. They’re pretty powerful.” There was a soft shuffling sound, and Keith saw Pidge lie down on the floor on the other side of his makeshift coffee table, head resting on his pack. “If he’s not awake by morning, we should worry.”

Keith hummed out a response. It didn’t take long before the sound of movement stopped and there was no sound but quiet breathing from all around him. He couldn’t make them keep watch after dragging them through the desert like that, so it looked like he would be the one to stay up that night.

He made it about ten more minutes before he was asleep, too. 

*

Shiro opened his eyes slowly. Once again he was waking in a new place with no idea where he was. This time, though, it was quiet. Comfortable. Carefully, just in case his initial feeling that this place was safe was wrong, he sat up and looked around.

He was in what appeared to be a one room cabin, on the only bed. In the predawn light that shown through the windows he could see four other people sleeping haphazardly on the floor. None of them looked familiar until he shifted to put his feet on the floor. Sleeping at the side of the bed, somehow still propped up, was…

“Keith?” Shiro knew he should be shocked. He had been captured by aliens. Crash landed onto earth. His memory was a mess of holes and gaps that he hadn’t even started to try to piece together. Right in front of him was someone he didn’t think he would ever see again. The only feeling he could muster, however, was just outright relief. 

At the sound of his name, the other man gasped and startled awake.

“Shiro…! You’re awake!” His voice was at the upper limit of a whisper, barely held back.

“Yeah. Somehow.” Shiro looked around one more time, and then back down at the stained and ratty clothes he was still wearing. His lip curled up in disgust. “You don’t happen to have something we could change into, do you?” The sooner he got out of the physical vestiges of his time away from Earth, the better. “I would rather go naked than keep this on,” he grumbled.

“Uh, yeah, sure, hold on.” Shiro stripped off the outer shirt while Keith rummaged around the small cabin, stepping over the other sleepers. “Here. It’s not much, but. Hopefully it fits.” Keith held out a pile of clothing. “And there’s a camp shower out back. Real first class, huh?”

“I promise it’s better than where we just came from. Thank you.” He took the clothes and mimicked Keith’s earlier movements to quietly step over everyone and outside. In his haste to get out and clean himself up, Shiro missed the confused frown on Keith’s face as he left the small cabin.

The air was chilly, but nothing terribly uncomfortable. He took a deep breath of fresh air before looking around. The wide open desert around him felt too big. An actual horizon with the sun lighting up the east almost brought tears to his eyes. Shiro let the atmosphere, literally and figuratively, wash over him as he slowly walked around the cabin. 

It only took moments to strip, dirty clothes tossed away into the dust. The camp shower shocked him with cold water but it was fresh and clean. He grabbed a bar of soap on a small shelf nailed directly to the outer wall of the cabin. When Shiro finally rinsed off the last of the suds, he felt like a new man. The desert air, even as cool as it was, dried him quickly. Once dressed, he was about to go back and join the others when the pile of discarded clothing caught his eye again.

His jaw clenched, right hand balling into a fist. Looking around again he saw a small pile of firewood and burnable trash with a box of matches left carelessly on top. 

By the time he walked back around to watch the sunrise Shiro felt more at ease than he thought he had any right to. Behind the cabin, the old prisoner’s uniform was nothing but ash.

Shiro found himself looking off into the distance, trying to conjure up any scrap of memory from before his crash landing back on earth. There was so much missing that he didn’t even know where to start. He looked down at his right arm, turning his palm up to look at it in the light of the new day. There was more to it than it just being an ‘organic prosthetic,’ as the medical technician had called it. He _knew_ that. But whatever had clouded his memory had been thorough. 

He tensed up slightly at the sound of footsteps behind him until a gentle hand rested on his shoulder.

“It’s good to have you back.” Keith let his hand linger.

“It’s good to be back.” Human touch for the first time in a long time was almost as healing as his newfound freedom.

“So, what happened out there?” Keith looked up at him, and Shiro didn’t miss the hurt hidden behind his worry and confusion. “Where were you?”

Shiro closed his eyes and sighed, trying to gather his thoughts to answer. “I wish we could tell you,” he finally replied, opening his eyes. “My head’s still pretty scrambled.” He gripped his right wrist with his left hand and squeezed tightly to try to ground himself. “We were – I was on an alien ship,” he started, correcting himself, “but somehow I escaped. It’s all a blur.” Something finally occurred to him as he realized Keith was responsible for getting him away from the Garrison soldiers.

“How did you know to come save me when we crashed?” he asked, turning to face Keith more fully.

Keith opened his mouth to reply before frowning again. “’We?’”

Shiro tilted his head, confused. He worked through his last words and frowned as well. Trying to think about why he might be referring to himself in the plural made a flash of pain bolt through his head and he winced. “I don’t… I don’t know. It was just me on that shuttle.”

Keith looked like he wanted to press him on it but let it go with a shake of his head. 

“You should come see this,” was all that he answered with. “Lance and the others probably should too.” He briefly touched Shiro’s arm again before leading back inside to the cabin.

All eyes were on Shiro and Keith as they walked in. Looked like he was gone long enough for everyone to wake up. 

Keith moved with purpose, reaching up to take down a sheet covering a large cork board that almost covered a whole wall of his cabin. 

“What have you been working on?” Shiro asked. His eyes moved across the papers and maps, unable to connect anything or really understand what he was looking at.

“I can’t explain it, really,” Keith started. “After getting booted from the Garrison, I was kind of… lost. And I found myself drawn out to this place.” His was facing the cork board, but his eyes were unfocused. “It’s like something… some energy was telling me to search.” He looked over and met Shiro’s eyes as if waiting for him to try to debunk his story.

“For what?” It took longer for Shiro to answer than he meant to. He didn’t realize Keith had been discharged… Why? They had both worked so hard to get him enlisted... 

“I didn’t really know at first. Not until I came across this area.” Keith placed his hand on a map with a series of circles converging on one area. “It’s an outcropping of giant boulders with caves covered in these ancient markings.” He gestured to photos of carvings and cave paintings tacked up on the board. “Each tells a slightly different story about a blue lion, but they all share clues leading to some event, some arrival happening last night.” He turned back to Shiro. “Then you showed up.”

Shiro took it in, not dismissing any of it. The fact that he was there and alive made it clear that everything Keith felt was legit. That seemed to be the end of the explanation, however, and Shiro realized he had more than just Keith to thank for his escape.

He turned to the other three, looking towards the one that seemed most in charge after Keith. “I should thank you all for getting me out. Lance, right?” he guessed. Shiro stepped forward and held out his right hand. Only as he was doing that did he realize the strange appearance of the limb might put most people off. 

Lance visibly hesitated before firmly clasping Shiro’s hand.

Shiro let out a tiny breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, turning towards the other two. 

“The nervous guy’s Hunk. I’m Pidge.” He shook Shiro’s hand without hesitation. Something about Pidge tickled a memory in the back of Shiro’s head, but Pidge continued speaking before he could try to focus on it. “So, did anyone else from your crew make it out?”

Shiro shifted his gaze away, guilt tugging at him. “I’m not sure. I remember the mission and being captured. After that, it’s just bits and pieces.”

“Yeah, sorry to interrupt,” Hunk said, not sounding very sorry at all but at least pulling Shiro out of his rumination, “but back to the aliens. Where are they now? Are they coming? Are they coming for _us?_ Like, where are they at this very moment?”

“I can’t really put it all together,” Shiro replied, shaking his head. “We – I remember the word “Voltron.” It’s some kind of weapon they’re looking for, but I don’t know why. Whatever it is, I think we need to find it before they do.”

Hunk spoke up again, lifting a backpack off the floor and digging through it. “Well, last night I was rummaging through Pidge’s stuff, and I found this picture.” He held up a photo of two people, grinning. “Look, it’s his girlfriend.” Lance and Hunk both laughed at the cute little memento.

“Hey, gimme that!” Pidge snatched it away and moments later he took the backpack away as well. “What were you doing in my stuff!?”

“I was looking for a snack; you always hook me up. But!” Hunk held up a finger and reached into his vest to pull out a small book. “Then I started reading his diary.”

“What?!” Pidge grabbed it back and flipped through it, making sure nothing was missing. “Learn some boundaries, Hunk!”

“I noticed the repeating series of numbers the aliens are searching for-” Hunk looked at Shiro, noticing his eyebrows being raised. “Oh yeah, apparently Pidge has been tracking alien communications without telling anyone, thanks a lot, Pidge. Anyway, the series looks a lot like a Fraunhofer line.”

Keith held a hand to stop him. “A frown who?”

“It’s a number describing the emission spectrum of an element, only this element doesn’t exist on Earth. Maybe that’s this Voltron they’re searching for.” Hunk glanced at Shiro for a brief moment. “With this information, though, I think I can build a machine to look for it. Like a Voltron Geiger counter.”

Lance grinned over at his friend. “Hunk, you’re a genius!”

Hunk shrugged off the praise while digging into a pocket. “It’s pretty fascinating, really. The wavelength looks like this.” He unfolded a chart scrawled on a piece of notebook paper.

Keith’s eyes widened in recognition. “Gimme that!” He jerked the paper out of Hunk’s hands. His eyes scanned back and forth over it briefly before holding it up to his cork board. The sharp contours of the line graph somehow matched up almost exactly to the natural skyline of rocks in a photo that Keith had tacked up on the board.

“That’s… that’s impossible,” Shiro said softly. 

“Not impossible.” Keith lowered the graph to look at a map just under the photo. “That’s where this energy has been leading me. There’s no way this is a coincidence.”

“Then that’s where we have to go, right?” Lance got closer to peer at the map. “How far away is this outcropping?”

“Close enough to make it there before afternoon if we leave soon.” Keith held on to the paper. “Are you gonna be able to make that device?” he asked, turning to Hunk and Pidge.

The two looked at each other before nodding. “I think we can rig something up with the spare parts I have with me,” Pidge confirmed. “Although, if you have anything I can scavenge…” He glanced at some consoles and hoverbike parts. 

“Don’t even fucking think about it, short stuff.” Keith hopped over and spread his arms protectively in front of the parts. It all just appeared to be junk to Shiro, but what did he know?

“Hey, hey, no need for the language,” Lance said. He grabbed Pidge by the collar of his shirt and pushed Hunk in front of him. “I think this is some outside work anyway.”

Shiro couldn’t hold back a laugh as the parade marched outside. Through the open door, he saw Lance upend Pidge’s pack and dump out more pieces of scrap and electronics than should have fit.

Keith sighed and shut the door, muffling the noise. “I should get some supplies ready. It’s only a couple miles out, but a hike out in the desert can be hard on people not used to it.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Shiro asked. 

Keith hesitated. He finally shook his head. “Get some more rest, even if it’s just sitting outside and supervising those three idiots. I’ll let you know if I’m ready before they are.”

Shiro wanted to ask to do more but he had a feeling Keith needed some time to himself. He nodded and quietly stepped outside.

*

Keith lowered the paper graph. They were definitely in the right place. This is the area with the strongest source of the energy he could sense, as well as where the carvings and cave paintings were. It hadn’t even taken that much out of his new pals to get there, either.

Lance took it all in with a confused frown. “Okay, I admit it. This is super freaky.”

Keith snorted. He wondered what Lance would think if he had been drawn out here the way he had. Compared to that, super freaky was an understatement.

“I’m getting a reading.” Hunk looked at their slapdash invention like he hadn’t expected it to work as it started to beep.

Pidge’s backpack had been repurposed as their ‘Voltron detector’ with a small radar dish sticking out of the top and over his head. Attached by a long wire was another detective device, this one in Hunk’s hand. Pidge followed closely behind as Hunk headed down into the rocks.

Keith just shrugged and followed along with Lance and Shiro. The electronic beeping took them to where Keith could have shown them by heart at this point: a small cave system covered in the lion carvings that he had been studying for almost a year now. 

He took the lead as they headed deeper inside. Just a few meters in and the cave was darker and harder to navigate. Keith was about to open his mouth and warn everyone to watch their footing when he noticed their expressions. Everyone was almost entranced by the carvings. It was definitely more impressive to see them in person than in the photos he had taken. 

Shiro stepped up next to him. His right arm somehow glistened wetly even in the dim cave. “What are these?” he asked, awe in his voice.

“These are the lion carvings I was telling you about. They’re everywhere around here.” Keith stepped up to the wall, looking at one that stretched up to the curved cave ceiling. He wasn’t paying much attention to anyone else when there was a hum of energy and the carvings burst into glowing blue light.

Startled, he stepped back as the whole cave became luminescent. “They’ve never done that before…”

The five of them were almost back to back when even more blue light shone from the floor. 

“You have to be fucking kidding me.” Keith felt the rumble of stone but before he could react, the blue light flashed and the stone under their feet crumbled away.

A sloping stone tunnel jolted them all down to a shallow pond, bruising the _hell_ out of Keith’s tailbone when he finally landed. He groaned, soaking wet and taking a moment to try to gather his jumbled thoughts. “Fuck…”

Lance splashed to his feet first. “You weren’t kidding,” he said faintly. “Those lions really are everywhere.”

Keith finally looked up. The blue glow from the cave above was even stronger, and it all came from a round force field in front of them. It stretched up above to guard a massive blue mechanical lion.

Nobody could take their eyes off the metal creature as they got up and tried their best to dry off, Keith included. A wild sense of accomplishment rushed through him. This is what he was searching for all this time, and they had finally found it.

“Is this it?” Pidge asked. “Is this the Voltron?”

Shiro moved to stand behind Keith. “It must be.”

“This is what’s been causing all this weird energy out here,” Keith confirmed to everyone. He approached first, feeling dwarfed by the scale of the lion as he stepped forward. It was enormous. “Looks like there’s a force field around it.” Keith didn’t really think about how everyone was able to see the gigantic blue barrier, just announcing his thoughts to himself like he did alone at home.

“Does anyone else get the feeling this is staring at them?” Lance ran back and forth behind him and between the others that were slowly walking up to join Keith at the barrier. 

“...No,” Shiro answered. Keith looked back to see Pidge and Hunk just shrug in response. Lance was the only one getting any type of vibes from this thing.

“The eyes are totally following me.” Lance’s back and forth path still brought him up to the lion before anyone else, right as Keith got close enough to touch the force field.

It rippled under his fingers but stopped him short of being able to get through. Touching it was like reaching under warm water to feel a layer of ice. “I wonder how we get through this.”

“Maybe you just have to knock.” Lance knocked twice on the force field, and somehow, that... actually worked. 

A rush of wind wooshed past as the force field deactivated and before it died down, Keith gasped. 

Five huge lions, including the one in front of him, flew through the sky. In a burst of light they five cats disappeared and were replaced by a huge robot wielding a flaming sword.

Just as suddenly as the vision appeared it was gone. 

“Holy fuck,” Keith whispered hoarsely. 

“Uh, did everyone just see that?” Lance looked around and Keith couldn’t even manage to work out a sarcastic reply at the obvious, just nodding.

“Voltron is a robot.” Hunk burst out. “Voltron is a huge, huge, awesome robot!”

“And this thing is only a part of it!” Pidge added in. “I wonder where the rest of them are.”

Shiro finally stepped out from behind Keith. “This is what they’re looking for.”

“Incredible...” Keith braced himself as awe was quickly replaced with alarm. The robotic cat moved on it’s own, bringing its head down right in front Lance and opening its mouth. A walkway extended to stop right at Lance’s feet. 

“Oh _hell_ yes.” Lance didn’t even hesitate before walking into the lion. 

“Should we follow him?” Pidge asked. He peered into the walkway. 

They could all hear Lance making his way through but it was Shiro that moved first, answering the question by walking up and into the mouth as well. Keith was right behind him, letting Pidge force a whining Hunk in to join them.

There was no way to get lost; the walkway led up to a roomy cockpit where Lance was already sitting in the pilot’s seat. A display lit up in front of him to show the interior of the cave and a control panel flashed into existence along with it 

Lance ran his hands across the panels with appreciative sounds that were interrupted by the biggest killjoy Keith had ever met.

“Okay, guys, I feel the need to point out, you know, just so we’re all aware,” Hunk rambled, “that we are in some kind of futuristic alien cat head right now.”

“Thank you, Hunk.” Shiro crossed his arms, unimpressed. “I’m sure we’ll all try to keep that in mind.”

“Whoa whoa whoa. Did you guys just hear that?” Lance twisted around in his seat to look at the others standing behind him. 

Keith frowned and titled his head to try to catch any noise. “Hear what?”

“I think it’s talking to me.”

Keith looked over at Shiro and the taller man just shrugged.

If Lance noticed their exchange, he didn’t show it. Keith continued to peer over his shoulder while Lance hummed thoughtfully, poking out a series of commands into the alien terminal. Whatever he did worked – the cockpit around them vibrated with the roar of the lion as it stood up.

“Okay, got it. Now, let’s try _this!”_ Lance leaned forward in the seat, shoving a pair of handles forward without any warning.

The lion burst forward and if Keith didn’t keep an iron grip on the chair in front of him and a hand braced on the low ceiling, he would have gone flying. Regardless of that he was still pressed against Shiro with Hunk’s considerable weight not making things any better.

“You are the worst pilot _EVER!!!”_ Keith was never one to get flight sickness but god DAMN was Lance’s horrible flying skills putting his stomach to the test. He never managed to even out his flight, smashing Keith one way then the other.

At last they got some fucking relief when the lion landed on the ground, running across a wide plain. 

“Isn’t this awesome!?” Lance turned a shit-eating grin to the rest of them.

“Make it stop,” was the only reply. “Please, for the love of god, make it stop,” begged Hunk.

“I’m not making it do anything! It’s like it’s on autopilot.” 

“Then where the HELL is it taking us?!” Keith demanded. 

“I just _said_ it’s on autopilot,” Lance shot back. “It says there’s an alien ship approaching Earth.” Keith dragged himself back to his feet to look at the controls in front of Lance. Nothing was in any language he recognized. “I think we’re supposed to stop it.”

“What did it say, exactly?” Pidge glared at Lance and demanded an answer.

“It’s not like it’s saying words. It’s more like feeding ideas into my brain, kind of.” 

Keith nodded to himself. If this thing was behind the feelings that had been guiding him for so long, communicating like that was par for the course.

“If this thing is the weapon they’re coming for, why don’t we just, I don’t know, give it to them?” Hunk was practically begging for his option to be heard. “Maybe then they’ll just leave us alone!” He looked around at the cockpit and pat a metal panel. “Sorry, lion. Nothing personal.”

Shiro turned a sharp gaze in Hunk’s direction. “You don’t understand. These monsters spread through the galaxy like a plague, destroying everything their path.” Keith didn’t miss the way Shiro’s right hand gripped at the panel that was supporting him. When he took a deep breath to continue and took his hand away, Keith could have sworn that he left indentations of his fingers in the metal. “There is no bargaining with them. They won’t stop until everything is dead.”

The cockpit was deadly silent. 

“Oh. Never mind, then.”

Keith ignored the tense silence after that, eyes locked on the display showing where they were. The lion had already taken them out of Earth’s atmosphere, though somehow none of them felt any sense of weightlessness. Before he could ask again where they were going something else caught his attention. 

A huge ship materialized in front of them, gray and black, with purple lights along the hull. No matter how much they kept flying towards it, it kept getting bigger. Keith couldn’t wrap his mind around the scale.

“Holy shit! Is that really an alien ship?!” Hunk put a hand on Keith’s chest and shoved him away to press Shiro for an answer.

Keith would have been angrier about the move before he saw Shiro’s reaction. His breathing was shallow, almost on the verge of hyperventilating. 

“They found us.”

There it was again – Shiro referring to himself plurally. But then maybe he was talking about the group as a whole? Keith was only able to ponder it for a handful of seconds before the alien ship started spewing a barrage of laser beams at them.

Pidge held on to the arm of the chair to keep from getting thrown around. “We’ve got to get it out of here!”

“I’m working on it!” Lance shouted right back. Somehow, even being a shitty pilot that barely squeaked into the fighter class, none of the lasers managed to connect. “All right. Okay. I think I know what to do.”

“Be careful, man, this isn’t a simulator!” Keith could have kissed Pidge; at least someone had some common sense around here.

“Well that’s good. I always wreck the simulator.”

“Jesus H. Christ, we’re all going to die!” Hunk clung to the chair.

Lance whipped the lion back around to face the ship. “Let’s give this a try.” With a shift of the handles, a blue beam spit out of the lion’s mouth and raked a flaming path across the hull. With that he pressed forward through the hostile fire until the lion’s claws cut into the ship itself. When Lance turned them around to see what kind of damage they had caused, explosions followed the red-hot path of molten metal. 

“Nice job, Lance.” Shiro’s praise sounded forced to Keith, but at least something had knocked him out of whatever trauma he was reliving in his head. 

Lance smirked up in acknowledgment. “I think it’s time to get these guys away from our planet.” The lion whipped around once again and sped away from Earth. A smaller screen, a sort of ‘rear view mirror’ of a display, appeared with a view of Earth shrinking behind them with the alien ship only getting bigger.

“They’re gaining on us,” Pidge warned.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Lance pushed the lion to move even faster. “I don’t know what’s going on, though. They aren’t shooting any more, they’re just chasing.”

“And that’s good? That’s a good thing?” Hunk looked around for someone to agree with him. 

“Hey, it’s getting them away from Earth, isn’t it?” Keith shot back. He frowned when he looked back at the console. A chart or map of some kind caught his eye. Nothing at all looked familiar, not compared to charts he was used to. “Where are we?”

Shiro was the one to answer, eyes glued to a view outside. “The edge of the solar system.” His voice was coarse. “There’s Kerberos.” 

“What? It takes months for our ships to get out this far. We got out here in like five seconds.” Pidge looked back at Shiro. “That means this thing goes faster than the speed of light!”

No one had the time to react to that. As soon as the fact was out of Pidge’s mouth, a glowing blue portal appeared in their path. 

_“What_ is _that?”_ Hunk gasped out.

“Whatever it is, I think the lion wants us to go through there.”

“Where does it go?” Pidge’s voice was suddenly quiet.

“I… I don’t know.” Lance looked up at Shiro. “Shiro, you’re the senior officer here. What should we do?”

Shiro took a deep breath. “Whatever is happening here, the lion knows more than we do. I say we trust it.” He looked around the cockpit and met everyone’s eyes, Keith’s last of all. “But we’re a team now, whether we like it or not. We should decide together.”

No one objected, looking at each other and then back down at Lance. Keith caught Shiro’s eye again and nodded. If this is what the lion wanted, the one that helped guide him to rescue Shiro, then he was down.

“All right. I guess we’re all ditching class tomorrow.”

Lance urged the lion into the portal and Keith knew nothing would ever be the same again.

*

The transport through the portal – what Shiro belatedly realized was a wormhole – shook and jolted all of them. Some of it was clearly a result of turbulent space-time(?) rocking the lion, but there was a vibration that worked through Shiro that felt different than anything he had felt before. It wasn’t pleasant, but he wouldn’t have called it painful under any _other_ circumstances. Now, however, it felt like his right arm was being torn apart by the individual cells. He clenched his jaw to keep from crying out in pain, but there was still a scream of pain echoing in his head. Neither the pain or the screaming stopped until the lion burst back into normal inter-planetary space.

Shiro was the last to force himself to his feet. His right arm was weak and still trembling. He held it close to his side to keep any of the others from noticing. 

The view presented to them through the lion’s cockpit was that of an Earth-like planet. Blue oceans, along with green forests and brown deserts. It was beautiful in its own way. Still, Shiro was instantly struck with intense homesickness. He had been on Earth for less than 24 hours and yet here they were: somewhere… else.

He glanced over the star charts on the console, and then out of the displays themselves. Nothing struck him as familiar, not as a view from Earth, or even the slightly different stars from Kerberos. 

“I don’t recognize any of these constellations. We must be a long, long way from Earth.”

Everyone was quiet as that sank in. It was Lance that spoke up first.

“The lion seems to want to go to this planet.” Shiro could feel more than see the feline ship readjusting their flight. “I think… I think it’s going home.”

“How does it know we can survive down there?” Pidge asked, frowning at the view. The display tinted red and orange as they entered the atmosphere. “What if it’s not the kind of air we need to survive?”

Hunk groaned. “Oh, great, another thing to worry about.”

Lance shook his head. “I don’t think it would take us somewhere just to kill us… right?” He looked questioningly at the console and controls around him.

“Great. Wonderful. Is anyone else having second thoughts about going through a mysterious wormhole?” Hunk glared down at Lance. Why are we listening to a robotic lion anyway?”

“It got us away from that alien warship, didn’t it?” Lance shot right back.

Keith gripped on to the pilot’s chair again as the turbulence almost knocked him down. Shiro put a hand on his shoulder to help keep him steady, somehow glad that it was his fully human left arm that was doing it.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re _in_ an alien warship.” He stood and Shiro quickly moved his hand away. 

“What, are you scared?” Lance needled back.

“With you at the helm? Terrified.”

“All right, knock it off.” Shiro spoke up, sensing that if he let this continue, the two opposing personalities would end up causing more problems than they could deal with right then. “No one’s happy to be in this situation, but we’re here now. If we want to get through this, we’ve gotta do it together.”

Shiro took a sharp breath, mouth suddenly dry. Why did saying that feel like it was the key to something important in his memory?

“Okay, then, what _do_ we do?” Pidge looked up at him and he quickly worked his internal worry away. 

“First, we find out where we’re headed.” He looked toward the pilot currently directing their flight. “Lance?”

“I don’t know. The lion’s not really talking to me anymore.” He shrugged and looked around apologetically. “Oh, hey, check it out! There’s a big-ass castle up ahead.” 

Everyone gasped in amazement when they got closer, Shiro included. The thing was massive, a giant central tower with four surrounding pillars that were only small in comparison to the main tower. It gleamed white in the sun and shining blue panels let out light bright enough to be glow even in the day time. At their approach, beacons of light lit up the tops of the tower and pillars, recognizing the lion.

The craft landed right in front of what seemed to be the main entrance. Everything looked to be on the up-and-up, but Shiro still didn’t relax.

“Keep your guard up,” he warned, doing his best not to clench and unclench his fist. 

Pidge frowned up at him. “Something wrong?” 

“My crew was captured by aliens once. I’m not going to let it happen again.” Shiro didn’t know much about most of the other four with him, but he couldn’t help feeling responsible for them. His escape had led the Galra to Earth, and these four just got caught up in all of it. Or so he told himself. 

No one objected to him taking charge, leading the way down out of the open lion’s mouth and on to the alien surface. The air was close enough to home to be comfortable, and the gravity was about the same. Shiro waved them all down behind him before they – most likely Lance or Keith – tried to go off on their own. 

Once they were all safely out of the lion’s mouth, the ground trembled behind them as the lion stood, operating on its own. 

“Oh, god, it’s gonna eat us, I _knew_ it was gonna eat us!” Hunk cowered down and even Shiro flinched when it let out a roar that shook him to his bones.

No one was eaten. Instead, the door to the castle groaned open, revealing a dark passageway. 

“Oh. The door is open. I guess I was wrong about you.” Shiro was the only one close enough to hear Hunk whisper back, “Sorry, lion.”

“We’re going inside, right?” Keith stepped up next to Shiro, and he nodded in reply. 

“This does seem to be where the lion was taking us.” Shiro started forward and as he predicted, the others fell in step behind him. 

Past the open door, the sunlight didn’t illuminate much past the first short hall. They were in almost total darkness by they time the group got to a large open room in front of a wide staircase leading upwards. 

“Hello?” Hunk’s voice echoed. There was no reply, at least not one Shiro could sense. He just shrugged when everyone turned back to look at him, as if to say ‘well what else are we supposed to do?’

Pidge took a step forward through the dim room. “From the size of the lion, I expected these steps to be bigger. You said it was going to its home, right?” he asked Lance.

Nobody got the chance to answer. A blue light shone down from above them and Shiro shifted his stance. If he needed to get them all out of there -

“Hold for identity scan.” Shiro looked around. He could understand it, of course, but the physical sound of the robotic voice was in an alien language he had never heard before.

“What did it just say? What’s going on?” Pidge asked. 

Blue circles of brighter light materialized around each one of them. Shiro saw a smaller individual circle of light try to form around his right arm before it just assimilated into the larger one.

“Why are we here!” Shiro shouted up into the light above them. Somebody had to be controlling this. “What do you want with us?”

No voice came back to answer them. Instead, blue-white lights came to life in sconces along the walls, finally revealing the room they were in. A large hallway was the only other place that lit up, inviting them to continue onward.

“What kind of language was that?” Keith looked around with a frown. Shiro noticed his right hand resting on the hilt of his knife that he wore in a sheath behind his back. “That wasn’t like anything I’ve ever heard before.”

“Calm down. It said it was just an identity scan.” Shiro peered down the hallway, wondering where it was going. It took him a moment to feel the stares of the others were all on him. His left hand drifted to the hard scar above his ear and it took a moment for his jaw to relax. That was one of the last intact memories he had before everything crumbled to dust. 

“The Galra needed me to be able to understand them,” he said simply. Deep breaths. “If there’s anyone alive in this place, I should be able to interpret.”

Shiro didn’t realize the hard look on his face was as intimidating as it was. In any case, the subject was dropped, at least for the moment.

Pidge stood on his tiptoes to try to get a better view down the newly illuminated hall. “So, I guess we’re going that way.”

The paths that the lights took them down were wide and clean but there was no hint of anyone or anything around other than them. Hunk would occasionally let out another echoed greeting as they went along, only getting his distorted words back in reply.

After a solid ten minutes of walking, avoiding darker paths and sticking to the lit hallways, a large door opened up in front of them. Inside was a circular room that Pidge rushed into first. 

“Where are we?” Lance asked, looking around while the group spread out to examine their destination. Large pillars surrounded an open central area, and in the very center was a pedestal with a minimal interface on it.

“It looks like… maybe some kind of control room.” At Pidge’s words, the pedestal started to glow. Rising from the floor out were two… Shiro could only think to call them pods of some sort. The shadows of two figures were inside, unmoving. 

“Are these guys… dead?” Hunk peered forward from almost the other side of the room.

As if in response, the nearly opaque front of the pod shimmered and disappeared, revealing what looked like a human woman in an elaborate dress, if he didn’t look too close. Her skin was dark, but her long hair was silvery white, and on her face just above her cheekbones were a pair of soft pink markings. Shiro couldn’t tell if they were tattoos or naturally a part of her skin.

She gasped out a word – “Father!” - before falling out of the pod and directly into Lance’s arms.

“Well, hello,” Lance purred. Shiro bit back a sigh at his heterosexual nonsense.

“Who are you? Where am I?” The stranger looked up at him and Lance’s eyes got wide, looking around.

“Uh. Am I supposed to be able to understand this?” He locked eyes with Shiro. “You knew what the computer out there said, right?”

“You cannot… understand?” The woman struggled to her feet, still allowing Lance to help her stay steady. When she saw she was outnumbered, she gave a disgusted look at Lance’s ears for some reason and quickly grabbed one. With a twist she turned him around and kicked his knees from behind.

“Who are you? Where is King Alfor? What are you doing in my castle?” 

“Wait! They can’t understand you!” Shiro stepped forward, hands held up to try to show that he was unarmed and peaceful. “A blue lion brought us here. That’s all we know. And I’m the only one that has the ability to know what you’re saying.”

She directed her attention to Shiro, bright blue eyes boring into his. Her fingers were still hooked around Lance’s ear to hold him still. “How do you have the blue lion? What happened to its paladin?” After a brief moment, while Shiro was still trying to figure out how to answer, she finally let Lance go.

“What are you all doing here? Unless… How long has it been?”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you tell us who you are? Maybe we can help.” Shiro kept his voice level.

The woman took a breath. She looked around at the rest of Shiro’s crew and sighed. “I see most of you must come from a planet without the same advantages we did. It is no use introducing myself if you must interpret for the rest of them.” She swept past them all to touch the console in the center of the room. A holographic screen appeared and with a few touches, bright blue lights the size of fireflies zipped out of the pedestal. After a brief pause, they sped to the four other humans to wiggle into their ears.

“Hey, what are you-” Shiro knew how painful it was for the Galra technology that allowed him to understand alien languages. Would it harm his newfound crew as badly as it did him?

“That tickles! Aaah, why didn’t I bring any cotton swabs.” Pidge spoke up first, sticking a finger in his ear and rubbing it vigorously. 

The rest of them muttered similar complaints, but no one seemed to be in pain.

“Can you all understand my speech?” the woman asked. She was just as serious as before, glancing around at them.

“Oh. That’s…” Keith looked confused. “You’re not speaking English, but… you are?”

“I’ll explain later,” she said, shaking her head. The woman stood at her full height, turning to address them all. “I am Princess Allura of Planet Altea. I’ve got to find out where we are and how long we’ve been asleep.” With that, she turned her full attention back to the control panel and started to work.

Shiro wanted to ask more, but was interrupted by the other pod opening and what looked to be a middle-aged man with a mustache stumbling out. He had the same style of markings under his eyes but they were light blue instead of pink. 

“Enemy combatants!” he yodeled, and jumped out at Lance. Lance had no trouble just stepping out of the way and when Shiro looked over at Allura, she seemed unconcerned about the commotion. 

Shiro bit back a grin as he watched curse and explain how if it weren’t for a case of “sleep chamber knees,” he would have taken Lance out without issue. 

“Oh my god…” Keith groaned and rolled his eyes when Lance whipped out some ridiculous ‘karate’ moves. Shiro had a feeling that the two of them would probably continue until somebody stopped them.

Allura’s voice stopped the mock fighting just moments later. “It can’t be…”

“What is it?” The man who had been in the other pod quickly hurried over.

“We’ve been asleep for 10,000 years,” she said softly. Even Shiro took a moment to parse that length of time, the device that translated her language taking a moment to find a measurement that he could understand.

“Planet Altea and all of the planets in our solar system have been destroyed.” 

“The whole system?” Pidge whispered. Shiro briefly reached over to put his hand on Pidge’s shoulder. Trying to fathom the loss of that much life made even his chest ache in sympathy.

“Coran,” Allura continued, addressing the older man, “Father is gone. Our entire civilization…” Her voice wavered before hardening again. “Zarkon.”

Shiro gasped and a sharp pain jolted through his right arm and settled in his head. That name – he _knew_ that name. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? A cold dampened his brow as he repeated the name, hoping it was some kind of misunderstanding. “Zarkon?”

“He was the King of the Galra.” Allura took a breath to steady herself before continuing. “A vile creature and enemy to all free people.”

Pieces of Shiro’s loose memory floated together as she spoke, joining together. It was vague and had feelings of nothing but pain, but at least it gave him some context to the time he lost after he was captured.

“I remember now. We were… I was his prisoner.” Shiro clenched his fist; this memory was important, he knew that. But there was something else about that missing time, something even more basic, that was like trying to catch smoke in his hands.

“He’s still alive?” Allura looked at him sharply. “That’s impossible!”

“I can’t explain it, but it’s true. He’s searching for a super weapon called Voltron.” That fact, at least, had escaped erasure, and hopefully this time someone would listen to him. 

“He’s searching for it because he knows it’s the only thing that can defeat him, and that’s exactly why we must find it before he does.” 

*

Keith watched the princess struggle with the control panel while the mustached guy – Coran, he thought he heard – disappeared off into the castle. His ear still itched from whatever she had made fly in there. It still made his head spin to hear her alien language but understand English in his head. 

Right as he was wondering if there was something he could do, Coran came back, toting a floating plate of what looked like the world’s most bland guacamole. 

“Princess, you must eat,” he urged, pushing the floating plate towards Allura. “It’s been 10,000 years.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Keith crossed his arms and did his best to keep his eye rolling to a minimum. She may have been a princess but she sure as hell sounded like a spoiled brat with that line.

“Man, 10,000 years?” Lance piped up next to him. “That’s like… one thousand plus ten.”

“That’s _times_ ten,” Keith corrected.

“Whatever, dropout.”

Keith glowered at him, but cursed himself for not having a reply to that.

Across the room, he saw Hunk start to poke at the weird green goo. Keith was definitely curious about what that might taste like but letting Hunk take the first bite was probably a better idea.

“I can’t believe your civilization created such advanced technology 10,000 years ago.” Shiro looked around, amazed.

“It was 10,000 years ago by a human timescale,” Pidge interjected. “If they were on a different planet, in a different solar system, maybe even galaxy, who knows when they came out of their people’s stone age.”

“Even still,” Shiro continued, giving Pidge wicked side-eye, “it must have been an incredible place.”

“Yes, it was.” Coran sighed. “But now it is gone and we’re the last Altaens alive.” His words seemed to hit Allura especially hard, maybe getting through to where before it was just an objective fact that hadn’t had time to sink in. 

Keith looked away from the sensitive scene when she fell into Coran’s arms with a sob. He wondered what else they might be able to do to help when she suddenly looked up and back towards the pod she had emerged from. Allura practically ran over and reached inside, and when Keith watched her pull her hands up, there were a few small animals that looked just like mice form Earth.

“Looks like we’re not the last after all.” 

As cute as they were, Keith was not a fan of mice. They loved to hide under the floorboards in his cabin and get into his food. Before he had the chance to reminisce any further, the lights in the room flashed red and loud alarms blared, making Keith nearly jump out of his skin. Even Shiro looked like it was messing with him, his hand pressing to the side of his head and a pained look on his face.

“A Galra battleship has set its tracker to us!” Coran shouted from the control console. He silenced most of the alarms while everyone gathered closer.

Allura frowned at the screen that still flashed red. “How did they find us?”

Lance crossed his arms as he stood next to Keith. “I’m not sure, but I bet it’s Keith’s fault.”

“Say whatever you gotta say to make yourself feel better.” Keith felt his eyebrow twitch and he turned to Lance, unable to keep frustration out of his voice. “After getting us stuck on the other side of a wormhole! Who knows what they were able to track when we went through!”

“I’ll stick you in a wormhole, bitch!” Lance got close enough for Keith to practically brush noses with him. Keith wasn’t sure _what_ he was gonna do, other than it was gonna be _something,_ until Shiro put a hand on his chest and pushed him away from Lance.

“Stow it, cadets,” he commanded, and if it had been anyone else, Keith would have shoved past them to slap that smug look off Lance’s face. “This is no time to place blame. It’s time to work as a team.” Keith locked eyes with Shiro for just a moment before the other man turned back to Coran at the control center. “How long before they arrive?”

“At their speed?” Coran counted on his fingers, mumbling to himself. “I’d say… probably a couple of days?” 

“Good.” Allura’s face hardened. “Let them come.” Her gaze swept over Keith and the other humans. “By the time they get here, you five will have reformed Voltron, and together, we will destroy Zarkon’s empire!”

As much as Keith wanted to believe that was possible, it seemed a little far-fetched, even to him. All they had was one lion with a shitty pilot, after all.

“Princess,” Shiro spoke up, apparently feeling the same way, “there are five of these lions. How are we going to find the rest?”

“I will show you. Follow me.” She swept off without waiting for them.

*

Shiro led the group behind Allura as she showed them to another large room in the castle. There was much more space than where the two aliens had been sleeping, and hanging from the ceiling was a large crystal. As Allura walked under it, several lights shone down through the crystal and lit the room in a sky blue.

“This crystal powers the castle. Only something as thoroughly magical as this could have enough energy for that,” Coran boasted. 

Shiro almost opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. Magic? All this advanced technology was being powered by _magic?_ Maybe the word or concept wasn’t translating correctly; it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, he realized. He tucked the thought away for later as Coran continued.

“King Alfor connected the key to the lions’ locations to Allura’s life force. A combination of her genetic material and essence that makes up her… well, her self. If she weren’t alive and well, we wouldn’t be able to pull up the coordinates.” As Coran finished explaining, a huge holographic star map expanded throughout the room. It was beautiful, in its own way. Shiro could feel a tiny grin on his face as he saw the same amazement from the others as well.

Pidge got over the awe first and looked closer at the map. As he reached out and touched a glowing symbol, the image of a black lion appeared next to the blue one they had flown in on. “It looks like there’s a black lion in the same location as the blue one.”

“Look at your primitive synapses firing away in their little brain cage.” Coran beamed down at Pidge and Shiro was worried he might have to break up another fight. 

“Very observant,” Allura interrupted, and this complement sounded more genuine. “That’s because the black lion is in the castle.”

“To keep the black lion out of Zarkon’s hands, King Alfor locked it in the castle. It can only be freed if the other four lions are present.” Shiro had never been especially patriotic, but he could see the pride Coran had for his king at the way the lion had been kept safe.

“As you have found, the lions choose their pilots. It is a mystical bond and cannot be forced.” Allura’s gaze swept over them. “The quintessence of the pilot, their very soul, is mirrored in their lion. Together, they can form something greater than even science can explain.”

Shiro felt a shiver run down his spine, and the short hair on the back of his neck tingled and stood on end. What about this sounded so familiar? What was he forgetting that he _knew_ he should remember? He didn’t realize his right hand was clenched so tightly that it was starting to ache until Keith reached over to bump his own hand against it. 

“The black lion is the decisive head of Voltron.” Shiro blinked and focused back on Allura’s words. “It will take a pilot who is a born leader and in control at all times, someone whose troops will follow without hesitation.”

With a wave of her hand, Allura slid the map and pulled up another set of coordinates. “The green lion has an inquisitive personality and needs a pilot of intellect and daring.” She looked over the group as if assessing them. “The blue lion-”

“Hold up, lemme guess.” Lance stepped up with his chest puffed up. “Takes the most handsome slash best pilot of the bunch?”

Allura looked at him flatly. “The _yellow_ lion is caring and kind.” She cleared her throat and regained her composure and Shiro was trying not to laugh again. He knew he shouldn’t be as mercurial as he was, but it had been so long since he had been around other humans, or at least other friendly humanoid aliens, that his emotions were a bit of a roller coaster. “Its pilot is one who puts the needs of others above their own. Their heart must be mighty. As one of the legs of Voltron, they will help lift the team up and hold them together.”

“And finally the red lion. It is temperamental and the most difficult to master. It’s faster and more agile than the others, but also more unstable.” The hologram of the lion appeared over her cupped hands. “Its pilot needs to be someone who relies more on instincts than skill alone.” Allura shook her head. “Unfortunately, I cannot locate the red lion’s coordinates yet. There must be something wrong with the castle… After 10,000 years, it might need some work.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find it soon.” Coran jumped to the side of the princess. “If there’s anyone that can repair the castle back to working condition, it’s yours truly.”

“How are we supposed to figure out who pilots each lion?” Keith spoke up, voicing the concern Shiro was nursing. “We can’t all go to each one and wait to be picked, right?”

“I have a feeling that most of you are already sensing the potential bond with your lion.” Allura looked across at Pidge and asked, “What was your name again?” she asked gently.

“I’m Pidge. And if you were going to ask me which one I liked best… I guess it’s the green one.” He reached out and poked the hovering image. “I don’t know if I would call myself daring, but if I weren’t curious, I don’t think most of us would be here.”

Allura nodded as if satisfied by the answer. “And what about you? I believe your… friend… called you Keith?”

“Definitely the red lion. If it has to do with instinct rather than skill-” Keith side-eyed Lance and Shiro gave him a quick thumbs up for keeping any other opinions to himself. “I just think it would fit.”

“Ah, geez, you’re going to ask me next, aren’t you?” Hunk sighed. “I’m definitely not a leader. Please don’t put me in charge of anyone.”

“Come on, Hunk, don’t put yourself down.” Lance elbowed him in the side. “Didn’t she say the yellow lion is caring and kind or whatever? Pretty sure you’re the only one here I would use those words to describe.”

Hunk shrugged, but there was definitely a pleased look on his face.

“That just leaves… you.”

“Shiro,” he said with a nod. 

“Even without knowing you all for very long, it’s clear how the others follow you, listen to your words. To me, at least, the black lion would be a perfect fit.” Shiro met eyes with her. Allura’s gaze was a powerful one. He almost felt like she could see into his mind. If only, he thought to himself.

“I’m not sure how qualified I would be to pilot one of these.” The image of the black lion floated closer. “But if it really does choose its own pilot and thinks I’m fit for the task, I don’t see how I can turn it down.”

“Then it’s decided!” Allura beamed at them while Shiro only felt unease. He held his right wrist in his left hand, thumb absentmindedly rubbing against the skin. Before he could try to put words to the feeling settling heavily in his stomach, the still lions burst into life with a roar, running through the simulated sky together.

“Once all the lions are united, you will form Voltron, the most powerful warrior ever known, the Defender of the Universe.” As she spoke, the lions joined together in a recreation of the vision they had in the cave back on Earth. A massive robot appeared before them before slowly fading, as did the walls around them, revealing the Earth-like sky.

“Wait, okay.” Hunk frowned thoughtfully. “We’re going to be in there and flying lions. Got that part. How do lions turn into legs? Also, is this going to be a long trip? I have to use the bathroom. Do you people have bathrooms?”

Shiro turned to him. “Hunk.”

“Sorry.”

“It sounds like we don’t have much time.” Shiro looked up at the map and considered what little he knew about the other humans with him. “Pidge and I will go after the green lion. Lance, you take Hunk and get the yellow one.” He put his hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Keith, you stay here,” he advised, hoping that he wouldn’t see it as being put aside from the action. “If you locate the red lion, go get it.”

Keith gave him a short nod. Shiro could see a desire to act in his eyes nodded back. “I’m sure it won’t take long,” he added quietly, giving his shoulder a squeeze before turning away.

“In the meantime, I’ll get this castle’s defenses ready.” Allura looked worried but determined. “They’ll be sorely needed.”

“And I’ll ready a pod and load the coordinates so that you can reach the green lion,” Coran told Shiro. “You should also be able to find the coordinates to the yellow lion easily accessible from the blue one now that they’re all active.” He waved for all of them to follow. “The hangar is this way, and I believe the blue lion has moved there as well.”

“So it’s just you and me, huh?” Shiro looked over at Pidge.

“Looks like it.” He had a bounce in his step, and not for the first time Shiro thought something about him was oddly familiar. 

“Back there you said if you weren’t as curious as you were, no one would be here. What did you mean?” Shiro was curious about that himself. There had been absolutely no downtime since they had blasted off from Earth, and he had no idea what led the small team to go find him in the first place.

“Well…” Pidge shrugged, eyes shifting away. “I was out on the roof of the Garrison looking – looking for alien signals,” he said, tripping over his words. “When Lance and Hunk came to find me for some downtime, we saw your ship crash out in the desert. After that, all this happened,” he said brightly. 

“Alien signals, huh?” Shiro had a feeling that statement wasn’t entirely true. “Whatever brought you out to where we crashed, I’m grateful for it. I don’t think the Garrison would have let me go once they got their hands on us. Thank you.”

Pidge’s hesitation turned into a proud grin. “You’re welcome!”

By that time, Coran had led them down into the hangar. Lance burst into laughter as soon as he saw his lion ‘parked’ next to the other ships. “Aw, look at you! You’re a loaf!” The lion purred to life when its pilot approached and stood up before kneeling back down to open its mouth for entry.

Shiro was surprised to see that the mechanical lion really had moved itself inside. He had to pull Pidge along with him by his backpack. “It’s so cuuuuute,” Pidge said with stars in his eyes.

“And I’m sure yours will be even cuter. Come on, in the pod.” Shiro plopped Pidge down into a seat before joining him in the other seat.

“Once the ship is launched, autopilot should take over,” Coran told Shiro. “There’s a manual flight control in case of emergency but hopefully that won’t be necessary. Once you get the green lion, the ship is programmed to follow you back here.”

“Roger that. You ready, Pidge?”

_”Hell yeah!”_

Shiro pressed his lips together to keep from laughing out loud. The front of the ship materialized into place and without much of a jolt, they were off. As they took off from the castle, the lion joined them in the sky. Only moments later they were far enough from the planet to view it as a sphere.

“We can only keep the wormholes that lead to the other lions for a short amount of time, so you’ll have to be quick about your work.” Coran’s voice was only barely distorted through the communication systems. A glowing blue wormhole opened in front of the small ship and Shiro felt his right arm twinge in pain. 

“The good news is that according to my readings, both planets are relatively peaceful. So, if you do get stuck, they could be relaxing places to live out the rest of your lives.”

“Excuse me?!” Lance’s voice cut in right after.

“Well, enjoy the trip!” 

Before anyone could object, the wormholes glowed even brighter and both ships were drawn through.

The ride through distorted space-time was much shorter than their previous journey, but Shiro still found himself clutching his right arm to his chest in pain when they emerged in orbit around the new planet. 

“Hey… are you okay?” Pidge leaned over in his seat. “Does your, uh, arm hurt?”

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “It happened last time, too. Something about it disagrees with these wormhole jumps.” Shiro worked his shoulder and fingers and the pain disappeared quickly.

“If you say so.” Pidge gave him a worried look before the ship headed down into the atmosphere.

Shiro was the first out of the shuttle when they landed. The air of the rain forest they landed in was incredibly humid but breathable, though Shiro was ready to haul Pidge back to the shuttle at a moments notice if that changed. When they had reached the planet’s surface a small device popped out of the central console with a map on it, and currently Pidge was leading the way as it beeped quietly.

He kept a vigilant eye on the surroundings so Pidge could focus on the map. Nothing stood out as dangerous – no flashing colors or quickly moving shapes. What few movements from insects and small animals he did see only made Shiro feel… hungry? Sure, he hadn’t really eaten much since a small respite at Keith’s cabin, but something told him everything he saw was an appropriate replacement for a meal. He was considering what that might mean when Pidge’s map took them to a wide stream.

“Hey, check that out.” Pidge pointed to a dugout canoe resting on a sandbank. At the bow was a crude but recognizable carving of a lion’s head.

“I guess we’re headed in the right direction.” Shiro wondered if the map would be able to guide them safely through a water system when rustle of leaves caused them both to look next to them.

“Oh, what the-”

“Aaah!!” Pidge practically scrambled on to Shiro’s back to hide from what looked like a giant, bipedal sloth. It didn’t _act_ like it was there to harm them, only making a strange growl that didn’t translate, and Shiro felt a twinge of disappointment that it was too big to eat.

“It’s just a… whatever that thing is,” Pidge remarked from his perch on Shiro. He looked at his map. It glowed a non-threatening blue. 

After assessing the pair, the sloth alien sauntered over to the canoe and beckoned them over, growling again.

“I… I think they want us to get in their canoe.” Finally climbing down from Shiro, Pidge waited for him to make a decision.

“Then I guess we should go.” Shiro shrugged. He could sense they weren’t dangerous, and if something happened he had the confidence he could protect Pidge.

“Uh. You sure?”

“I was locked up on an alien prison ship for a year. This is nothing.” Shiro walked through the shallow water and towards the docked canoe knowing Pidge would follow.

The sloth was considerate enough to make sure the canoe stayed steady as they got in. Shiro sat near at the stern and for the first time since this wild journey started, he started to relax. Pidge sat near the bow and continued to check their direction on the map even though the sloth looked like they knew where they were going.

“What do you think those are?” Pidge asked.

Shiro looked in the direction Pidge was, where a colony of little furry creatures waved with multiple arms. “Mmm… lunch?” he said without thinking, and quickly put his hands up and laughed uneasily. “A joke! It was just a joke.”

Pidge looked at him suspiciously but let it slide. “Hey check that out.” The canoe floated into a cave marked with a now familiar lion carving.

“Guess this guy knows where they’re going.” The shady cave was cooler than the humid jungle. Even in the light reflected off the clear water they could see even more carvings, almost like the cave in the desert back on Earth.

“I wonder if Hunk and Lance are having as good a time as us,” Pidge pondered.

“I don’t know much about those two, but I’m sure Hunk is keeping them out of trouble. He doesn’t seem like somebody that likes to purposefully get into trouble.”

The canoe shook when Pidge let out a loud laugh. “You wouldn’t know the half of it. If it were up to Hunk, you’d probably still be stuck out in the desert with Keith.”

“That so.” Shiro let his stark black ‘prosthetic’ hand trail in the water. He didn’t think that would be the worst thing to have ever happened to him. 

They emerged back into the sunlight. It made the metallic undertones of his arm stand out. Shiro thought it was almost beautiful, if you could call light shimmering off an oil slick beautiful.

Something about the glitter of light off the water and the babble of Pidge talking about his Garrison partners put Shiro into a sort of trance. That arm… it was a part of him, but was a completely different person. A person? He closed his eyes. The sound of a voice floated through his mind. There were no words to it but he knew it as well as his own inner thoughts. Angry, constantly hungry, proud, just as scared as he was but fiercely protective. His closest companion on that Galra prison ship.

**shiro**

“Hmm?”

**Shiro… “Shiro!”**

Shiro bolted upright, nearly overturning the canoe. He looked up apologetically at the sloth who managed to keep them all from falling out and got an angry grunt in response.

“Shiro, are you okay?” Pidge was looking back at him, frowning behind his round glasses. “Did you pass out from the heat or something?”

He shook his head both in response and to clear it. “No, no, I’m good. It’s just… been an eventful few hours. I guess we could sense we were safe and my body decided to nap while it could. I can’t really think of the last time I got any restful sleep.”

“Maybe you’ll be able to get some real rest soon.” Not even Pidge looked confident with that statement. They were on their way to collect a giant lion to fight off a battleship, after all. 

“Maybe. But I’m fine. I promise.” Shiro settled back down and shooed off Pidge’s attention. The stream was larger now; he would definitely feel comfortable calling it a small river now. He wasn’t exactly sure what had come over him back there. Something had started to resurface from his memory but slipped away before Shiro could grasp it – at least, that’s what he thought at first.

“I know the Princess said this was supposed to be my lion, but what if she’s wrong?” Shiro turned his attention back to the stern. As he had been thinking, Pidge started rambling again. “She’s probably not wrong. She’s a princess. But I’m not a pilot! Even though I’ve always wanted to be a pilot. I read all the fighter manuals, but I never got to fly the simulator.”

“Pidge, take a breath before you pass out.”

“But I can’t be that much worse than Lance. He crashed all the time-”

The sloth looked back at Shiro, and all he could do was shrug again, a wry grin on his face. He was guessing they weren’t used to such talkative visitors. 

“What if I get in there and it doesn’t respond? What if I get in there and it’s too big and my feet don’t touch the pedals? I have little legs, I’m short, it’s happened before – Wait, what if there aren’t even pedals?!”

Shiro spoke up again. “Hey, you’re rambling. Listen.” Words that he had taken to heart a lifetime ago came to mind. “Our commander on the Kerberos mission was the smartest man I ever met, and he always said, “If you get too worried about what could go wrong, you might miss a chance to do something great.””

They both relaxed as the words got through to Pidge. The younger kid took a deep breath and sat up straighter. Slowly the canoe turned around a bend in the river, revealing more thick rain forest pushed up against an overgrown temple. 

“I guess this is our stop,” Shiro said, unable to keep the awe out of his voice.

The two of them splashed in the shallow water as they got out, leaving the kind sloth ferryman behind them. 

Getting closer to the temple caused carvings and glyphs to glow neon green. “Just like the cave with the blue lion,” Pidge murmured. He turned back to Shiro, eyes wide. 

“Go. Be great.” Shiro knew he chose the right words when he saw Pidge’s eyes light up. Without a second thought, he turned back around and raced towards the temple.

There was nothing to do but wait and watch. Pidge disappeared among the thick roots and foliage. For just a brief moment, right as Shiro felt like just maybe this wasn’t a good idea, there was another feeling. There was someone standing behind him and watching as well. Before he could try to find where the feeling was coming from or if it meant a threat, green light flashed from under the millennia of forest growth. 

A green lion burst out with a roar and landed in front of him. Shiro grinned, his chest warm with pride. He knew then that they really _did_ have a chance of fighting against Zarkon.

The green lion crouched down like it was about to pounce, but opened it’s mouth instead. “What are you waiting for?” Pidge shouted from inside. “We have a giant robot to build!”

Shiro laughed and, with renewed energy, he ran into the lion’s mouth to join Pidge in the cockpit.

In all the excitement, Shiro didn’t notice that the other presence watching along with him never really went away.

*

Keith leaned against a support in the bridge and picked at his fingernails with his knife. So far there had been no news, just Coran digging through the electronic guts of the map console and Allura looking more and more exhausted as she stood under the strange blue light of the crystal.

“That should do it.” Coran struggled out and to his feet. “We should be able to locate the red lion any time now.”

“About time…” If his internal sense time was still right, this had taken almost two hours. Two hours of doing nothing and standing around and trying not to get pissed that Shiro had basically stranded him here. He went to look at a smaller version of the room-sized celestial map that Coran pulled up, now that he was done repairing the console.

With a small blip, a green dot appeared next to their location. “That must be Shiro and Pidge finally back.” 

“And not a moment too soon,” Coran confirmed. The lion only took a few minutes to get through the atmosphere and back down to the castle.

Shiro and Pidge were all smiles when they returned. “That was awesome!” Pidge announced, and even Keith found his enthusiasm contagious. 

“How’d it go?”

“It was so cool! It was a giant rain forest of a planet-”

From behind Pidge, Shiro only grinned at Keith and shrugged a little.

Just as he was wrapping up his story, with a small interlude about how even though he was short everything was the right size, blue and yellow dots appeared on the map. With a sigh, Allura relaxed and Keith noticed the little symbols representing the wormholes disappeared in reaction.

Lance and Hunk stumbled through the door to join everyone else and Keith raised an eyebrow at how beat up they looked.

“You made it!” Allura smiled down at the from her small platform.

“Yeah, just barely.” Lance shrugged and worked one of his shoulders. “That was a nightmare. I thought I was gonna puke. I felt like Hunk.”

“How do you think _I_ felt? I _am_ Hunk.”

The look Shiro and Pidge shared wasn’t missed by anyone. “Yeah. We had a tough time, too,” Pidge said with a smirk.

Shiro’s expression quickly faded to something more serious. “Did we find the red lion yet?”

Allura summoned the larger map again. With a wave of her hand, a splash of light expanded from her and over the notable systems on the map. A red dot blinked into existence.

“Hmm. Looks like good news and bad news.” Coran frowned at the coordinates of the red lion. “The good news is that it’s near by,” he proclaimed, twiddling his mustache. “The bad news is, it’s on board that Galra ship now orbiting Arus.” Keith wasn’t the only one who looked at Coran with a little bit of a blank face. “But that’s more good news! We’re Arus!”

“They’re here already?!” Shiro took a step forward. The look on his face was intense enough for Keith, who was standing almost on the other side of the room, to want to take a step back.

“Yes. Guess my calculations were a bit off. Finger counting is more of an art than a science…”

Keith reached up to rub his temple, where a headache was starting to form. Two days had turned into two hours. Great. He didn’t get much longer to worry about it. The star map disappeared and in it’s place, a large screen covered in static appeared. The static quickly cleared up, showing all of them a much more distinctly alien face than at least he had yet to encounter.

“Princess Allura, this is Commander Sendak of the Galra Empire. I come on behalf of Emperor Zarkon, Lord of the known universe. I am here to confiscate the lions. Turn them over to me, or I will destroy your planet.”

There was no pause for Allura to answer. As soon as he was done delivering his ultimatum, Sendak cut the video feed and the large screen disappeared. Keith glanced back at the others, though his eyes focused on Shiro. His eyes were wide and his mouth pulled back into a grimace. What had Shiro been through that would cause him to feel that much fear?

Once again, time to think about it wasn’t on his side. Even as the others were still trying figure out how to react, Shiro, with visible effort, forced his expression into something more neutral.

“All right. Let’s not panic.”

“Not panic?! The scary purple alien thing is driving his battleship right towards us!” Hunk started. “We only have four lions-”

“Technically only three working lions. The black lion is still locked in its hangar,” Pidge added.

“That’s right. Thank you, Pidge. Three working lions and a castle that’s like, 10,000 years old!”

“Actually, it’s 10, _600_ years old,” Coran interrupted. “You see, it was built by my grandfather-”

Hunk stopped him with a hand shoved pretty much directly in his face. “Thanks, Coran. Thank you for that.” He turned back to everyone else. “See? Now is the perfect time to panic!”

“Wait!” Allura stood up straighter from her position in the center of the room. “This castle has a particle barrier we can activate.”

Keith saw Lance start to mumble something with a smirk on his face, who only stopped when Shiro gave him a murderous look. _”Lance.”_

“So a particle barrier. That’s what, a force field?” Keith spoke up and looked at Allura.

“In all essence, yes.” She pulled up a display of the Galra battleship that was in orbit.

“Even so, it won’t hold against Sendak’s ion cannon forever.” Coran pointed to a large section of the ship that was shaded in red. “The scans of the ship are hardly compatible with what we have on file. Galra technology must have advanced considerably since we fought them last.”

“Panic now?” Hunk asked, almost sounding hopeful.

“No. We’ve just got to figure out our plan of action. And figure it out _quickly,”_ Shiro said decisively. 

Lance spoke up. “I say we pop through another wormhole and live to fight another day.”

“I second that!” said Hunk, surprising no one. “We tried to find all the lions, right? We gave it the old college try. Couldn’t do it. We only have three; can’t form Voltron.” He shrugged like that was the end of the story.

“Then it’s settled. Can we get the fuck out of here already?” Keith thought Lance might just walk out and leave anyway. 

“We can’t just abandon Arus.” Pidge glared at Lance and Hunk. “The Galra will keep destroying planets and capturing prisoners until we stop them. That’s all they’ve done for ten _thousand_ years. You think they’ll give up just because we ran away?”

“Okay, but, if we run, maybe Sendak will follow us and leave this planet alone, like when we left Earth.” Hunk was a coward, but at least he was a smart one, Keith thought to himself. There was a flaw in his plan, though.

“Sendak could just destroy the planet and then come after us anyway,” Keith finally said. “Staying is our only option.”

“Here’s an option. Shut your goddamn mouth and let’s fuckin’ go.”

“We’re _staying.”_ Even if it was just him against a battleship of evil aliens, Keith wasn’t going to just run away.

“Leaving!”

“Staying!” Pidge stood next to him.

“We gotta run!” Hunk took a place next to Lance.

“Guys, stop it!” Shiro’s voice cut through the argument just as much as his glare did. Keith saw his right fist clenched again, though he kept his arms at his side. Was that some new kind of tic he had picked up? 

“Princess Allura, these are your lions,” Shiro continued. “You’ve dealt with the Galra Empire before. You know what we’re facing better than any of us. What do you think is the best course of action?”

Keith was surprised to see the princess hesitate. “I… I don’t know,” she mumbled, looking down.

The tension in the room was high. Keith looked back and forth between Shiro, determined to find an action to take and take it, and Allura, who looked out of her element for the first time since they had met just a few hours ago.

Coran was the first to break the silence. “Perhaps your father can help,” he suggested, though even he sounded a little hesitant.

“My father?”

Keith frowned in confusion. Hadn’t that been a big deal? To find out the former king was dead? How could he help?

“Come with me. Hopefully we won’t be long,” Coran said to the rest of them. “And when we come back, we’ll have a better idea of what to do from here.”

None of the humans said anything while Coran and Allura left. The argument from before had fizzled out, since it seemed that the answer was going to be found while none of them were even around. 

Keith moved over to Shiro and nudged his hand again. “You’re gonna hurt yourself if you keep tensing your hand like that.”

Shiro jumped as if the touch had shocked him. “Oh. Yeah. You’re right.” He opened his hand and flexed it, but Keith could tell he wasn’t really paying attention.

“You were the tie-breaker,” Keith said quietly, glancing around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear. “You could have made a decision either way. Why are you letting somebody else decide?”

“It’s not really our decision to make, is it?” Shiro looked up at Keith but frowned and glanced over his shoulder. There was nothing there.

“But it is! Allura said we would be the ones piloting those lions and putting ourselves in danger. If anything, our choice matters more than theirs, right?”

Keith thought he might have pushed Shiro too far when he saw the taller man set his jaw, either with determination or frustration. It wouldn’t be the first time – but he wasn’t going to bring that up, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts.

“None of us matters more than any other,” Shiro finally said. His face twitched into a frown and he shrugged his shoulders like he was trying to get someone’s hand off him. “Once Allura gets advice from whatever space ouija board she’s using, we can all figure out a final decision.”

Keith nodded, but something else nagged at him now. “Are you okay? Did something happen when you were with Pidge that wigged you out or something?”

Shiro started to shake his head in denial, but then paused. “...I’m not sure. It just feels like since we got back, something is watching me from right over my shoulder.” Keith saw him suppress a shudder. “But it’s nothing. I’m sure it’s just some kind of stress from everything. I’m fine.”

“If you say so.” Keith didn’t want to drop the subject but it was clear that Shiro wasn’t going to say anything more. It felt like days but in reality, hadn’t it only been less than one day since he had crash landed on Earth? After escaping from an alien prison ship and only god knows what happened to his arm? Psychology had been a class he only took for the credit back when he was still going to that shitty community college, but Keith wondered if Shiro was dealing with anything like PTSD.

But now wasn’t the time to ask about it, even if he wanted to or had the knowledge to ask in a sensitive way. The door to the bridge hissed open to reveal Allura in some sort of battle armor. To Kieth it looked like matte porcelain, but flexible and light. Her long hair had also been pulled up into a tight bun.

“You five paladins were brought here for a reason,” she said, eyes full of a new determination. “The Voltron lions are meant to be piloted by you and you alone. We must fight and keep fighting until we defeat Zarkon. It is our destiny.” Allura stepped forward and closer to them. “Voltron is the universe’s only hope. _We_ are the universe’s only hope.”

All of this was… well, it was a lot. Fighting to protect Earth, or a few planets where they were was fine. But the entire universe? Keith considered speaking up until Shiro beat him to the punch, his confidence hiding the quirks that Keith was so concerned about. After a glance to the rest of them at his side, and with no one outright objecting, he spoke.

“We’re with you, Princess.”

She nodded once, as if that was the only thing she had expected him to say. “Follow me.” With that, Allura turned and the humans rushed to follow after her. Just a short walk from the bridge, in a windowless room, were five more ‘pods.’

“Your suits of armor,” Allura announced.

The sets of armor didn’t look like anything Keith recognized. He walked up to the case containing a set of white armor with red accents and considered it thoughtfully.

“So far there’s been no issue with the planets you have visited,” the princess continued. “However, these suits contain small personal atmosphere generators, in case there are planets or moons that have no breathable air or an inhospitable mix of gases.”

Keith nodded to himself. It was more than coincidence that they hadn’t had any issue on Arus, and the others didn’t have any problems getting the yellow and green lions.

From the corner of his eye, Keith saw Shiro quickly glance over his shoulder and try to disguise the movement as him working his prosthetic arm. 

“All right, boys. It’s time to suit up!” With that, Shiro reached forward. A touch was all it took for the glass covering the suits to slide away and the rest of them hurried to do the same.

Keith took his suit from the display and examined it while Coran led them to a couple of changing areas that reminded him of a locker room. The outfit consisted of a form-fitting black bodysuit with the white armor going on over it. Even without the armor, the black fabric had a surprising heft to it, and Keith briefly wondered if it were bulletproof. Not that they’d be likely to run into pedestrian guns while in fucking outer space, he told himself. 

He was willing to leave his all of his clothes in the changing room, except for his knife. There was no way he would trust that to anyone else. He found a place to holster it on his left side without much trouble. It didn’t fit the look of the paladin armor but that didn’t worry him too much as long as he could keep it on him.

When he pulled the breastplate over his head, a small blue light flickered to life around the gorget. With a quiet _woosh_ the ‘personal atmosphere generator’ powered on. Keith took a deep breath. “Damn. That really does make a difference.”

The last piece left was the helmet. He slipped it on and joined the others. Somehow, either through a quirk of alien technology or random coincidence once again, the armor fit all of them like it was made for them. Allura waved them to a table and placed her hand over the center. Opaque blue glass, similar to what protected the suits, slid away to reveal four oddly shaped devices.

“The bayard is the traditional weapon of the paladins of Voltron.” As Allura spoke, the equipment lifted from the table. “It takes a distinct shape for each paladin.”

Hunk reached out for his first. With a flash of light, the yellow bayard transformed into a heavy gun. 

Keith grabbed his next, curious if they would all be projectile weapons. Instead his turned into a sword, and a weightless but sturdy-looking shield appeared from the back of his left gauntlet. He gave the sword a few test swings. It felt lighter than it should, like it wouldn’t have the weight behind it to do any damage, but he had a feeling that was probably incorrect.

He looked up in time to see Pidge taze Lance with his green bayard, which looked like a small dagger. Keith snorted. Lance probably deserved it.

Shiro was the only one without a weapon. Keith continued to inspect his sword while keeping an ear turned towards Allura as she explained why it was missing.

“Shiro, I’m afraid your bayard was lost with its paladin.”

“I guess I’ll just have to make do.” At least Shiro didn’t seem concerned. 

Keith was easily able to turn his bayard back into it’s small handheld form and holster it opposite of his knife. Allura had them follow her back to the bridge where Coran pulled up the image of the Galra ship once again.

“You’ll need to retrieve the red lion from Sendak’s ship.”

“That’s a pretty big ship.” Keith felt eyes on him and realized he was talking aloud to himself again. “How are we gonna know where the red lion is?” he added quickly, hoping that might cover over the trait he developed living by himself for so long.

“It’s not a matter of ‘we,’” Pidge said, looking up at him. “It’s a matter of ‘you.’”

“Pidge is right. Once we get you in,” Hunk added, “you’ll be able to _feel_ its presence and track it down.”

“Yeah! You know how you felt that weird energy out in the desert?” Lance asked.

“I do. You made fun of me for that,” Keith replied flatly.

“And I’m proud of that,” Lance said with that fucking insufferable smirk. “Turns out, it’s exactly like that mumbo-jumbo.”

Allura spoke up before Keith could test his new bayard on a target. “Keith, remember, the red lion is extremely temperamental. You’ll have to earn its respect.”

Keith nodded once. He wasn’t exactly sure _how_ he would do that, but he was confident he could. Shiro seemed to agree with him with the way he placed a hand on his shoulder and gave him a confident grin.

“All right. I’ve had some time to think on it. Here’s our plan of attack,” Shiro said to the rest of them, giving Keith one last pat on the shoulder before letting his hand drop. “The Galra Empire knows about the blue and yellow lions, but they don’t know we have the green lion, too. Hunk, Lance, you’ll act as a decoy by pretending to give yourselves up.”

“Ugh. Great. Right in the line of fire,” Hunk grumbled.

“While Sendak is distracted, Keith, Pidge, and I will sneak onto the ship in the green lion. Keith and I will find the red lion while Pidge guards our exit.”

“Sneaky. I like it.” Keith was more than a little surprised by the eagerness in Pidge’s eyes.

“Hunk, Lance, find some way to take down that ion cannon while we’re inside. After that, it’s back here to unlock the black lion.” Shiro turned to look at each one of them. “Any objections?”

Everybody shook their heads, and Keith saw that even Coran looked like he approved. 

“All right, then. Let’s get started.”

*

Shiro closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. He and Keith stood inside the green lion’s cockpit while Pidge piloted the craft around Arus’ moon, angling to get to the Galra ship without being detected. 

He wasn’t sure exactly what was trying to set off a barely held back panic attack. Maybe it was the presence watching over his shoulder, the one he could sense no matter where he stood or what he was doing, that had only gotten stronger since getting the green lion. It could have been the fact that they were headed back to a Galra battleship that no doubt housed at least some prisoners in the same manner he had been. Or maybe it was just overstimulation; so many things had happened over the past few hours that he didn’t know how to process them all. In any case, now wasn’t the time to break down in front of his crew. They had a job to do.

Shiro only opened his eyes when he felt the soft jolt of the lion touching down on the belly of the ship. “The suit and helmets provide breathable air, but that alone won’t protect you from the vacuum of space,” Allura said, voice coming in through an earpiece in the helmet. “There should be a small button near the bottom of your helmet. Touch that and it will seal up your suits.”

“Copy that.” Shiro found the button easily, as did Pidge and Keith. “You ready?” 

Pidge and Keith both nodded. The three of them headed into the lion’s mouth. An airlock hissed open and the gravity, artificial or otherwise, that they felt inside was suddenly gone.

“Whoa. It’s a good thing I don’t get motion sick,” Pidge joked. He laughed as he spun around and oriented himself to the surface of the ship.

“There are small boosters in your suits,” Allura advised. “Use those to direct your movement until you can get back into the gravity field of the ship.”

This time there was no explanation of how they worked. When Shiro focused on the hull they were about to breach, however, he felt himself move forwards. Unfortunately there was no time to question how it worked. Pidge already had his bayard out and quickly cut a round hole in the thick metal.

Shiro led the way inside the battleship. The change from weightless space to the gravity of the ship was disorienting but manageable. He watched as Pidge and Keith used their suits’ boosters to lower themselves to a deck in what appeared to be a part of an enormous engine room.

“Pidge, what’s your ETA?” Lance’s voice cut through the suspense.

“We’re in.” 

“About time. I’m not sure how much time we’ve got til the jig is up.”

“We’re working on it,” Shiro insisted. He turned to Keith. “You lead the way.”

Keith took point and led them into a smaller passageway meant for foot traffic. Pidge kept his bayard out and prepared to stay and guard the exit. And Shiro…

Shiro thought he had prepared himself to be back aboard a Galra ship. Even with the air provided by his suit he could still smell that cloying mix that the aliens breathed, making his chest tighten up. The purple panels lighting the passageway were the same and made his vision blur. He felt his breath catch in his throat. No, no, no, he couldn’t deal with this, not now, not yet - 

His right hand clenched shut tightly enough to hurt and gave him something to ground himself on. He took one deep breath, then another. He could do this. There was a reason this ship triggered such an intense reaction, he realized.

“I’ve been here before,” Shiro quietly told the others. “After I was taken by the Galra cruiser off Kerberos, they brought us here.”

“So that means your other crew members – they might be held captive here.” Pidge spoke up and even in his stressed condition Shiro could read an unusual sense of excitement, almost panic in his voice. “We – we gotta rescue them.”

“Pidge, we don’t have time.” Shiro took a breath. He hated having to deny that request, but they had priorities they _had_ to stick to. It was that or let an entire planet be destroyed. “We have to get the red lion and get back to Arus.”

“But we can’t just leave prisoners here!”

“Look, no one understands that more than me, but in war we have to make hard choices.” Shiro turned towards Keith to head in the direction of the red lion. “Let’s get moving.”

“No!”

Shiro was shocked at the outburst. He and Keith both turned to look at Pidge.

“Commander Holt is my father.” Shiro felt his eyes go wide. “He and my brother were the ones on the Kerberos mission with you.”

“Commander Holt is your father?” He frowned and searched his memory, the parts from before he was captured. Holt never mentioned having another son, especially one with as unique a name as ‘Pidge.’ The only other child he spoke about was...

“Yes. I’ve been searching everywhere for him and my brother, and I’m not gonna give up looking when I’m this close. I won’t!” Pidge turned around to pace off without either Shiro or Keith.

“I’m coming with you.”

“What?” Keith turned to Shiro with a frown.

“I remember where the prisoners are held,” Shiro said. He forced his body still so as not to show the shudder trying to run down his spine. “Keith, you go find the red lion.”

“By myself?” There was an unmistakable note of hurt in Keith’s voice.

“Minor change of plans. You’ll be fine,” Shiro said. He meant it, too, and it wasn’t just something to placate Keith. He was probably the only one that Shiro could trust to handle himself alone on the Galra ship. But before Keith ran off, Shiro put a hand on his shoulder. “Just remember. Patience yields focus.” It wasn’t the first time he had told Keith that, and he made sure to meet his eyes and impress on him that he wasn’t just saying that to say it.

Shiro could see the impulse in Keith’s eyes to just run off towards the red lion as fast as he could and damn the consequences. As what he said sank in, though, Keith finally nodded. Hopefully he would be cautious enough to at least watch out for himself.

The sound of footsteps echoed through the passageway. “Good luck!” Shiro urged, and ran from the footsteps towards the cells he had been trapped in not that long ago.

Purple lights became replaced with green. They were close. Shiro was about to turn them down another passageway when a small floating droid appeared in front of them. 

“Shit-” He struggled to come up with an action when Pidge beat him to it. She lifted her arm and fired a slim laser to knock it out of the air.

“That thing saw us,” he cautioned. “We should get out of here.”

Pidge leaned down to examine the small droid. “Wait. I think this thing might come in handy.” She picked up the droid and they moved to a small alcove to get out of the way in case any other snooping Galra showed up.

“How did you know your suit could do that?” Shiro asked, watching her pry open a panel and start pulling out wires.

“I was messing with it while everyone was changing. I think everyone’s has them, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.” Pidge pressed some wires together and used that same laser to solder them in a different place. “Hopefully this pulls a system reset. It’s either that or bricked it.” She shrugged and slapped the panel shut.

The droid lit back up and this time the purple lights were a dim blue. “It should be working for us now.” She stood up as the droid floated around her head. “I’m going to call you Rover. Follow me, little guy!”

“We’re close. Come on.” Shiro felt his anxiety boiling up as they walked down a painfully familiar passage. Panels on the wall showed that most of the cells here were empty. The Galra must have gotten rid of most of the prisoners before they broke off from the main fleet to chase after the lions.

“I don’t know how to open these doors without force,” Shiro admitted.

“Hmm…” Pidge looked at her new droid. “Open up.”

With a few quiet beeps, the droid interfaced with the panel. It only took a few moments to unlock the door.

“Excellent work, Pidge,” Shiro said with a grin. He lost the smile quickly, though, as soon as the door hissed open.

Pidge slipped in before the door was fully open. “Dad?” Shiro was quick to stand behind her in case any of the prisoners thought this was an opportunity to attack and escape. That didn’t seem to be the case, however.

“Don’t be afraid,” Shiro said calmly to the cowering aliens. “We’re here to help you escape.”

“It’s you,” mumbled one in the back. “It’s the Champion.” They looked around at the other prisoners. “If there’s anyone that can get us out of here, it’s him.”

Shiro felt a flash of pain, the kind when he tried to remember something that had been knocked out of his memory. Along with that, there was also a sense of shame, as well.

“Wh-What did you call me?” Shiro asked, voice much less confident than when he was declaring his intent to rescue the prisoners.

“We don’t have much time,” Pidge announced before anyone else had the chance to answer him. She didn’t even try to keep the disappointment out of her voice for not being able to find her family. “Let’s find some escape pods and get out of here.”

“Right. Let’s go!” Shiro waved the rest of them out of the cell while Pidge led them through the ship with the help of Rover.

The sight of an open escape pod made even the most weary prisoner perk up and move faster. Shiro was hopeful that they might be able to get out of there without a problem until metallic footfalls echoed in the room.

“Halt!” The robotic soldiers stood in formation in front of them as the prisoners managed to get into the shuttle.

“Get out of here! Take that shuttle down to Arus!” he said shouted, and pushed Pidge behind him. If she was really who he thought, then she was just a kid. There was no way he could let her get hurt in a fight like this. Even without a weapon, he would make do, just like he promised Allura.

He held his hands in front of him in a fighting stance. There was no chance he could win against five of the guards without any kind of weapon. It was a suicide mission.

**No.**

Shiro’s right hand trembled and black tendrils rushed out from under the fabric of his glove. They crawled up his arm in a split second to stain his white armor just as black. At the same time, memories were forced painfully from behind injuries keeping them locked away.

_The taste of blood hot and thick in his mouth. His black hand crushing the throat of an enemy in front of him. Bones cracking and flesh ripping with the shouts of thousands deafening him._

When his vision cleared, the ends of Shiro’s fingers had sharpened into vicious claws veined with silver. He knew _exactly_ what to do with them. 

Shiro rushed forward before the guards could react. His claws cut through the guns and armor like butter, with hardly any resistance. It only took him seconds to dispatch them and he was hardly even out of breath by the time the were just scrap on the ground. He licked his lips, a literal thirst for blood coming over him, before the look of fear in Pidge’s eyes knocked it out of him. The manic energy that allowed him to defeat the guards disappeared in an instant and he fell to a knee, the black oozing away and back under his armor.

He struggled to his feet as the shuttle took off. “Thank you, Shiro,” he heard before the hatch doors shut.

“Wait, how do you-!” 

The shuttle was gone before he could finish his question.

Pidge reached out and her hand hovered above his right arm before drawing away. “Shiro, that was…” She swallowed and didn’t finish her statement. “Where did you learn to fight like that? What even happened with your arm?”

Shiro looked down at his open palm. “No idea,” he said with a frown. Before he could think any harder about it, Keith’s voice came through their helmets. 

“I’ve got Red! Let’s get out of here while we still can!”

Shiro closed his hand. He could deal with this, and everything else running through his head, later. 

“Come on, Pidge. Let’s get back to the green lion.” 

Pidge nodded, her confidence returning when it was clear that Shiro wasn’t going to go berserk again. “Right. As soon as we get back to Arus we can unlock yours.”

Shiro let her lead the way. As the others bantered about their success, he stayed mostly silent. There was too much that he didn’t know about himself. What _was_ his arm? What was that voice he heard? How _did_ he learn how to fight like that? What did those aliens know about him that he didn’t? It was too much. And from how Pidge reacted after she saw him fighting, it was probably a bad idea to bring it up with anyone else.

He stayed deep in thought until they landed back down on Arus. “Hey. Shiro?” Pidge tapped on his helmet and startled him back to reality. “Are you okay?”

“O-oh. Yeah.” He took a breath and tried to focus. “I’ve got a lot to think about, that’s all.”

Pidge’s eyes glanced over at his hand for a brief moment. “Right. Well. We’re waiting for you to unlock your lion. Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“I think you’ll like them. Your lion, I mean.” Pidge lowered the green lion’s head so he could hop out. “Good luck!”

Shiro nodded and headed out. While he had been thinking, the others had walked their lions into a massive hangar in front of a black door. It totally dwarfed him as he walked forward. Doubt crept into his mind. What if they were wrong about him, and he wasn’t meant to pilot the black lion? What if the lion rejected him outright?

The presence watching Shiro suddenly shrank back and almost disappeared. He had almost, _almost,_ started to get used to it, and the sudden absence was almost lonely.

Before he could question it any further, an even larger spirit manifested itself. It was judging him, searching through his mind that would have seemed invasive if it didn’t feel so… so kind. Shiro felt it examine him and when it was done, a sense of total acceptance washed over him. It had seen _everything,_ even things he couldn’t see himself, and still thought he was worthy.

He was still reeling from this all when the black door in front of him slowly lifted. The black lion peered down at him and Shiro knew that the presence was theirs. Lights came to life all over the lion and it straightened, towering over him even further. It let out a roar that was echoed by the four other lions before kneeling and waiting for him to approach.

Shiro finally understood what the others were talking about when they were advising Keith about finding the red lion. Something just felt _right_ when he sat in the pilot’s seat. Unfortunately there was no time to relish that.

“Sendak is entering the Arusian atmosphere,” Allura warned them. “We need Voltron _now!”_

He didn’t need any more prompting. Shiro took to the controls, knowing what they did and how they worked like he had been flying the lion for years. He led the others out of the castle and on to the grounds outside.

Smaller ships were strafing the castle’s force field while Sendak’s ship hovered behind them. Shiro considered what their next move might be when the main cannon of the Galra ship glowed to life, shooting a flash of deadly light at the protected castle. The force field stood up to the assault, but inside they were still nearly blown away by vigorous winds.

“Damn, those Galra don’t waste any time repairing their ships, do they?” Hunk said in a strained voice. Shiro understood the pain; he could feel the hot winds swirling around the lion like it was actually happening to him.

“The barrier gets weaker with every blast, big or small,” Coran told them. “Once that shield goes down, the castle will be defenseless.”

“I can give you cover with the castle defenses for a while, but you have to form Voltron now or we’ll all be destroyed!” Allura’s words were cut off by another blast from the main cannon.

“Listen up!” Shiro let the pain spur him to action. “The only way to succeed is to give it all you’ve got. This looks bad, but we can do this! Are you with me?” Shiro swore he could feel his team’s determination.

“...I’m nodding, is everyone else nodding?” Hunk’s babble made Shiro roll his eyes, though he wasn’t sure he’d have it any other way.

“Yes,” everyone else replied flatly.

“Then let’s do this!” Shiro pressed forward through the force field and the others quickly followed.

“Uh. How?” Lance asked.

Shiro instinctively opened his mouth to answer before realizing he had no idea. “Good question. Any ideas?” he asked, opening the floor to everyone else.

“I don’t see a ‘combine into giant robot’ button anywhere on my console,” Hunk informed them helpfully while they dodged laser fire.

“Ugh, this is ridiculous!” Pidge huffed. “Can’t they just cease fire for one minute so we can figure this out? Is that too much to ask?” Shiro saw her break out of formation to leap into the air. She grabbed one of the smaller ships and threw it into another.

“We’ve got to do _something,”_ Keith insisted. 

“Combine!” Shiro felt a twinge of sympathetic pain when Hunk body-slammed Keith’s lion out of the blue.

“Hey!”

“Okay, that didn’t work. At least I was trying something!”

Shiro felt a mounting frustration as he dodged around the laser fire. Allura popping up in a window didn’t help. “Quickly, paladins! Our energy levels are getting low!”

“Maybe if we fly in formation, we’ll just... combine,” Shiro suggested. It was a last ditch effort, but like Hunk said, at least he was trying something. “Take off on my cue!” He turned led them all towards a cliff edge. “One, two, three, go!”

Shiro focused everything he had on the thought of his lion combining with the others… but there was no response.

“Nothing’s happening!” he growled in frustration.

“Hey! Waitwaitwait – I think I feel something!” Lance’s voice sounded hopeful.

“I do, too! It’s like… we’re all being pulled in the same direction!” Hunk added.

“Uh. Guys?” Shiro examined the screens in front of him and looked further upwards. “I think I know why. Look up.”

Sendak’s ship had locked them all in the tractor beam. 

Lance groaned. “Aw, what the hell?”

While they were trapped in the beam, they were helpless to stop another shot of the ion cannon from the invading ship. With a blast that they could feel even that far from the castle, the protective particle barrier collapsed and disappeared, leaving it defenseless.

“Oh, no…” Immediately after that shot, the cannon lit up again to power up for a final blow.

“I don’t care what you say, Shiro, I’m panicking now!” Hunk told him. The others started to echo his sentiments, getting out what sounded like last words and final thoughts.

Shiro gripped the controls of the black lion. He didn’t understand exactly what he was feeling, but there was something telling him to not give up. Was it the lion? The nosy presence watching over his shoulder? He didn’t care. He leaned on that feeling like his life depended on it. 

“No!” Shiro broke through the others’ protests. “We can do this. We have to believe in ourselves.” He took a breath and continued. “We can’t give up. We are the universe’s only hope.” The foreign feeling urged him on. “Everyone is relying on us. We can’t fail! We _won’t_ fail!” Shiro felt a ghost of déjà vu but pushed it away. “If we work together, we’ll win together!”

“Yeah!” he heard the others shout in unison.

The lions broke out of the tractor beam with a roar. Shiro felt the black lion shifting around him, and as the other lions joined his, it almost felt like the other four paladins were standing in the cockpit with him. As soon as the transformation was complete, Shiro felt their combined wills work in harmony, shoving the gigantic ship’s cannon just enough out of alignment for it to miss the castle.

“I can’t believe we did it!”

“We formed Voltron!”

“How are we doing this?” 

Shiro grinned and only responded to the last triumphant outburst. “I don’t know, but let’s get that cannon!” 

With the aid of the other paladins, they gripped the cannon and ripped it off Sendak’s ship like it was nothing, easily tossing it to the ground below them. It was just as easy to punch through the hull and fire the red lion’s laser, effectively breaking the ship into two pieces with a very satisfying explosion.

“Come on; we’re not done until this ship is grounded!”

The five paladins wrecked through the ship, breaking through supports and firing the red and green lions’ lasers to send explosions throughout. They didn’t stop until they flew directly through the engines at the back of the ship. The blast that buffeted the giant robot as the ship crashed didn’t phase any of them.

When the lions finally broke apart, Shiro felt the same sense of loneliness as when his mysterious watcher disappeared. It was tempered, however, by a feeling of triumph as he led others back to the castle. Allura and Coran ran out to greet them all as they exited their feline ships.

“Good work, paladins!”

“Thanks, pretty lady,” Lance said, giving her an exhausted finger gun. 

Shiro let himself laugh at Lance’s nonsense just this once, and gave Keith a heavy pat on the back as he joined the others. “We did it.”

“Fuck yeah, we did,” Keith agreed with a grin.

“Okay, but how?” Shiro wasn’t being very serious when he asked that, but of course Hunk had something to say.

“I was just screaming the whole time. Maybe that did it.”

The only one of them that wasn’t celebrating was Pidge. She simply pulled her glasses out from her suit and put them back on, gripping her helmet tightly with her other arm.

Shiro reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, careful not to move too fast. “We’re not going to stop searching until we find your brother and father,” he promised softly. “Wherever they are, I know they’d be proud of you.”

Pidge didn’t look satisfied with his answer but gave him a smile anyway. “Thanks, Shiro…”

“We won the battle, but the war has only just begun,” Allura said, her cheerful tone turning more somber. “I’m afraid Zarkon will not stop until he gets these lions.”

“Good think you paladins know what you’re doing, because you’re going to have to form Voltron again and again.” Coran put his hands on his hips, looking like a proud teacher in front of students that had just aced a test.

“Wait, what?” Hunk said with incredulity.

“We barely survived forming Voltron this one time,” Lance added, just as doubtfully. 

“And you only had to fight one ship! Wait until you have to fight a whole fleet of them!” Did Coran really have to look so enthusiastic about that? Shiro wondered silently. “It’s not going to be easy being the defenders of the universe.”

Once again the thought crossed Shiro’s mind that the entire universe seemed like far too big of a scale for one empire to control, but now wasn’t the time to argue. He just knew he had to rally his little troop into better spirits about their whole situation.

“Defenders of the universe, huh? I guess that’s got a nice ring to it.”


	2. Some Assembly Required

Shiro sat blearily at the table in the galley, still half asleep. The bowl in front of him was full of what _should_ have been incredibly unappealing “food.” It was green. It was lumpy. It had no taste, other than what vaguely reminded him of the smell of fresh cut grass. The bowl in front of him was his third in a row.

He had woken up in the middle of the night with the sensation that his stomach was trying to eat through his body. Sudden spikes in hunger had become fairly common over the last two days, since they defeated the Galra ship. They would be more tolerable if, Shiro thought, they had access to food other than the green goo. Or if it didn’t feel like the presence watching over his shoulder wasn’t disgusted at his only choice of sustenance.

The edge was finally starting to be taken off his hunger when he heard bare feet walk in to the room behind him.

“Oh. Good. You’re… you’re here.” Lance sat down in a free chair. The normally upbeat and talkative paladin was nearly silent.

Shiro took one last bite and slid the his bowl to the side. “You don’t sound like you’re very happy to find me.”

“I was kind of hoping that I wouldn’t.” Lance crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t look directly at Shiro. “I wanted to ask you something. And I don’t know if I really wanna know the answer.”

A deep frown drew Shiro’s eyebrows together while his stomach roiled around what he had just eaten. Was Lance here to ask about his arm? Had Pidge told anyone else about the fight at the escape pod shuttle bay? He kept his voice as neutral as he could, asking, “What did you want to know?”

Lance took a deep breath. “Shiro… When we took down that battleship. How – How many people did we kill?”

Oh. That was most definitely not the question he had been waiting for. “This has been bothering you since the ship went down, hasn’t it?” was all he could say at first. Looking back at the last couple of days, Lance’s cheerful demeanor had seemed off and now he knew why.

“Yeah.”

“I have good news and bad news. Mostly good.” Shiro picked up the spoon he had been using and rubbed it clean on the edge of his shirt just to give his hands something to do. “Galra claim to have dominion over most of the universe. Their ships are huge and filled with personnel, but almost all of them are robots with basic AI. They have enough of a difference in personality to make decisions in groups or on the fly.” He looked at his reflection in the bowl of the spoon, upside down and distorted.

“So… what’s the bad news?”

“There are still _some_ Galra on the ships. They usually number in the tens, at most.” Shiro closed his eyes as the memories eased themselves to the front of his mind. “The closer to the main fleet the ships are, the more living passengers and crew members. If we keep this up, there’s no question that Galra will die.”

Shiro looked up as he finished speaking. Lance was still obviously troubled, but more thoughtful now.

“What do you think happened to the Galra on Sendak’s ship?”

Shiro shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said truthfully. “If they’re still alive, I’m sure we’ll find out at some point. They don’t give up easily.”

Lance closely examined his face before nodding, satisfied. “Thanks. For being honest. I can’t say I like your answer but. I’m not sure what else I should have expected.” He stood up and stuck his tongue out when he saw Shiro pull his half-finished midnight snack back in front of him. “You like that stuff?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.” Lance shrugged. “Well, I guess when there’s nothing else, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?” He slapped Shiro on the back on his way out of the room. “See you in the morning.”

“Later.” Shiro waited until he was until he was sure Lance was gone before tucking back into his bowl of goo. No use wasting food after all.

*

Keith still wasn’t quite used to the day-night cycle of Arus. He found himself waking an hour or two before dawn and wanting to go to sleep as soon as the sun set. Lance could call him a party pooper all he wanted but rest was important. In any case, that still meant he had nothing to do for a couple hours before everyone else woke up and was ready for the day.

He sat in his bunk and turned his knife over in his hands, though his thoughts were elsewhere. Shiro hadn’t brought up anything about before he was captured on Kerberos. Not that Keith had wanted him to. But was that something he had forgotten? If so, was it because it didn’t matter, or because of whatever had scrambled his memory? Or was he just refusing to acknowledge the past they had together? Keith sucked in a breath when the sharp edge of the knife nicked his thumb. “Shit.” That’s what he got for letting his mind wander with a sharp object in his hand. He was still sucking a bead of blood off of his fingertip when alarms blared through the room followed by Allura’s voice.

“Everybody up! Zarkon’s attacking!”

“What?!” Keith leapt out of bed and grabbed his jacket, shoving on his shoes as he ran out into the hall.

“The castle’s about to be destroyed!” he heard shouted at him. As he ran towards the main control center of the castle, something about the princess’s voice didn’t sound as genuine as he thought it should. “Go, go, go! We need Voltron now! Hurry, we can’t survive much longer!”

And then he heard Coran’s voice and Keith knew for sure it was some kind of test, though he didn’t slow his run through the castle.

“Oh, no! Allura is dead! Oh, it’s horrible! Her head fell off!” 

Keith arrived at the bridge after Shiro, with Pidge and Hunk not that much farther behind. It was certainly an impressive display that Coran was giving…

“Wait! Her severed head is trying to speak to me!” Keith looked at Shiro, hoping to nudge a grin on to his face over the performance, until he saw a tense and angry expression on the taller man’s face. “What is it, Allura’s head? What are your final words?”

“Coran.” The princess glared down at her advisor. Between Allura and Shiro, if looks could kill, Coran would be nothing but a smear of dust on the floor.

“Yes, Princess, I’m listening!”

“It’s over,” she announced, touching a button and turning off the blaring alarms.

“Oooh, I know! If only Voltron had been formed,” he groaned. Only then did Coran notice he was being watched. He jumped to his feet. “Time!”

“I guess this isn’t an actual attack.” Shiro’s voice was flat, totally devoid of humor. Keith saw the helmet tucked under his arm and wondered how it wasn’t already in splinters under his angry grip.

“And it’s a good thing it wasn’t! It took you – Coran?” Allura glanced over at him and the stopwatch he had in his hand.

“Seventy five degrees!” He looked back down at his device and grinned with an embarrassed look on his face. “Ah, sorry. I had it set to measuring between coordinates this morning and…” Coran tapered off as Allura steamed next to him.

“However long it was, it was too long.” Allura marched in front of them. “You must always be ready to do battle with Zarkon,” she preached, and Keith just crossed his arms. “Look at you! Only Shiro is uniform.”

“Probably because he never took it off,” Keith mumbled under his breath.

“Keith, Pidge, Hunk, where are your bayards?” She looked back and forth between them all again. “And where is Lance?”

As if on cue, the door to the bridge opened and there Lance was, in a ridiculous getup that he found god knows where.

“Good morning, everybody,” he said through a yawn. “What’s going on?”

“Coran and I have been up for hours getting the castle back together!” Keith met eyes with Pidge and Hunk, seeing his grimace mirrored on their faces. At least her anger was focused on someone else now. Not that Keith had any reason for Allura to be truly angry with him, he quickly thought to himself. At least he had _a_ weapon on him.

“We had to run a test on the alarms, and we decided to test you as well. Guess which one failed.”

“Hey.” Hunk was the one that spoke up first. “You got to sleep for 10,000 years. Monday night, I was on Earth. Now, like, what, two? Three days later? I’ve flown through space,” he said, counting on his fingers, “fought some evil alien named Zarkon, and had nothing to eat but green goo in some weird castle. That’s a lot to process in uh. I don’t know. However long it’s been.”

Allura sighed and calmed herself. “You _must_ understand the stakes of our mission.” She activated the star map around them, surrounding them by blue coordinates. “Over the last 10,000 years, the castle picked up distress beacons from the following locations.” With the touch of another button, most of the blue dots turned red. “We have to assume that Zarkon has conquered almost the entire known universe.”

Keith frowned. Something about that scale bothered him. What did the ‘known universe’ detail? Did it mean just open space or galaxies, or galactic clusters… Hmm.

“Earth is here,” she continued, swiping her hand through the map and sliding the red away to a much smaller patch of blue planets and systems. “An attack on your planet is inevitable.”

“That’s… not great,” Hunk murmured.

“Exactly. Our mission is to free all of those planets, and keep any more from falling into Zarkon’s hands.” She deactivated the map and the constellations of red and blue blinked out of existence. 

“Coran and I are getting the castle ready to leave Arus. During that time, you _must_ learn to form Voltron so we can begin fighting Zarkon in earnest.”

“The princess is right.” When Shiro spoke, his voice was calm, rather than flat and angry like before. “Let’s get to our lions and start training.”

“Wait.” Pidge looked up at Shiro. “I want to talk to the prisoners we rescued from the Galra ship.”

“Unfortunately, I’ll have to stop you,” Coran informed him. “The prisoners need to remain in the cryo-replenishers for a few more days. As soon as they’re healed up and recovered, we’ll let you know.”

“That’s right.” Allura shooed them towards the door and Keith allowed himself to be herded out of the room with everyone else. “Now, get dressed and get to your lions.”

*

Shiro continued to focus on deep breaths as he was lifted up to his lion. False alarm. It was just a false alarm. The Galra weren’t here, and the ship they had destroyed was still smoldering in ruins.

He kept repeating those phrases to himself in time with his breathing. It wasn’t until he was finally seated in the black lion that he felt remotely back to normal. The presence watching over his shoulder was muted whenever he was in there, shrinking under the watch of the black lion, and Shiro felt safer in the cockpit than he did anywhere else in the castle.

“I really should pick out a name for you,” he said with a sigh, but only after making sure his mic was muted. “Since it’s obvious you’re not going anywhere.” There was no answer from the presence, of course. He figured he was just projecting when he thought he felt it rile around in anger. “What, you already have a name?” Shiro taunted, checking energy levels as the lion prepared for departure. “I’m all ears, buddy.”

Shiro frowned as he felt a feeling of the lion’s disappointment wash over him even as the presence raged. He huffed and decided he would keep any taunting of his new shadow out of the cockpit. 

The disappointment quickly faded as he flew them out of the hangar, flicking his mic on as he did so. He was the first out since he was already in uniform when the princess called them for the alarm test, and he allowed himself a couple loops around the castle towers before landing.

Keith was the next one out, quickly followed by the others. Shiro wracked his mind for ideas on how to form Voltron while they did some warm-ups but still had nothing even when they lined up in front of him.

“All right, let’s just fly in tight formation until we’re totally in sync.” Shiro wasn’t too sure this would work. The lion purred silently, however, encouraging him. At least one of them was confident.

Allura popped up in a window of his console and most likely appeared to the others as well. “Feel the bond with your lions _and_ your fellow pilots until five units become one, and you form Voltron!”

The team let out a cheer in response and Shiro took the lead position as they took flight, hoping they could all harness that enthusiasm. 

They did not harness that enthusiasm.

Shiro led the four others across the plains in front of the castle, now dotted with crashed Galra fighters, for a good half hour before Hunk finally spoke up. “So, uh. Is anything supposed to be happening yet?”

“Clearly this isn’t working.” Shiro sighed. “Let’s land and take five to regroup.”

In front of the castle, the five lions sat in a circle. Shiro rested his chin on his hand and watched with a little grin as the green lion batted a small boulder between its front paws. Only a moment later did he realize that it was probably the size of a large boulder.

“Maybe we should be building Voltron from the ground up,” Keith suggested.

“What do you mean?” Shiro asked, needing some clarification.

“I mean, let’s literally try building Voltron, by stacking on top of each other.”

Lance snorted. “Like a cheerleader pyramid?”

“You got a better idea?” Keith shot right back.

“It’s worth a try,” Shiro said, breaking up the fight before it started. “Anything is, at this point,” he mumbled, too softly for his mic to pick up.

The few minutes it took to climb and fly into place were chaotic, but fruitful. Or so Shiro thought. After he had the black lion leap on top, he felt another weight settle on him. He peered upwards, and a video feed showed him that Hunk’s yellow lion was clinging to the black lion’s red wings.

“Hunk. What are you doing.”

“What do you mean?” Hunk replied in earnest, either not picking up or ignoring Shiro’s exasperation.

“You’re supposed to be the leg. Over there.” Shiro did his best to ignore the amusement from both the black lion and the presence haunting him.

“What? No… I’m pretty sure when we did it last time, I was the head. Right?”

_”Shiro_ is the head,” Keith broke in. 

“All the time?” Hunk asked, disappointed.

“Let’s just try it my way for now,” Shiro said flatly. 

“Okay. But next time I call head.”

Shiro sighed and rolled his eyes. He could hear that echoed by the others through his headset. Once Hunk moved the yellow lion off of Shiro’s, the group reformed, this time in the ‘proper’ order.

“We’ve got arms and legs… and I’ll form the head,” he said to himself, carefully lowering the black lion on top of the others. Only once he was sure that everyone was securely perched in place did he loosen his grip on the controls. Shiro took a slow breath.

“Feel the bonds with your lions,” he said, instructing the other pilots as much as himself. “Now, focus your thoughts and energy into combining our lions into forming Voltron.” Shiro closed his eyes and concentrated on the spirit of the black lion. He got the impression that they were just watching patiently and waiting to see what happened. 

_Come on, we have to do this,_ he thought loudly. In return, the image of a large black cat sitting down and tucking all its paws underneath it formed in his mind. That was probably not a good sign.

Finally, after a long minute of silence and stillness, Shiro peeked one eye open. “Is everyone else bonding and focusing?”

“Why was this so much easier before?” Lance lamented.

Shiro sighed and sat back in his seat. “Let’s take another break.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Allura said, startling Shiro, “but I may be able to help.” When no one stopped her, she continued. “When you fought Sendak’s ship, you weren’t able to form Voltron until you were in the heat of battle.” Small screens with everyone’s faces popped up as they all agreed. “Perfect! Because I need to run a diagnostic test on all of the castle’s defenses. This should help!”

“Uh… I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Pidge warned. Shiro hopped down off the failed Voltron formation and the others followed his example when they saw the castle’s particle barrier form. Only seconds later they were bombarded with laser fire.

Keith was one of the first to get his bearings back, judging by the way his voice blared into Shiro’s ears. “Allura, what are you doing!?”

“Running a diagnostic test on the castle defenses and _inspiring_ you!”

“Some inspiration this is!” 

“I believe in you, paladins!” She kept going, ignoring the interruption. “Let fear be your guide! Form Voltron!”

“Fuck this!” Lance broke off from the group, peeling away to turn around. “I’m heading back to the castle!”

Once Shiro realized what he was trying to do, he tried to warn him. “Lance, wait! The defenses are up-” He grimaced as he watched Lance try to leap through the particle barrier only to be repelled and bounce painfully to the ground.

“Please stop!” Hunk was having the most trouble. His lion was bulky and strong but slow, and every shot from the castle got closer to hitting home. “Come on, give us a break!”

“Do you think _Zarkon_ is going to give you a break when things get tough?” Shiro worked not to bare his teeth at the name; both his lion and the presence despised Zarkon and that only fed into his own fear and hate. “He’s probably on his way right now to destroy us all!”

With that, Allura’s video feed cut off.

After that was what Shiro could best guess was about two hours of running from lasers, trying to regroup with the others, and a constant feeling like he was failing his team for not being able to get them to work together. Eventually the constant barrage of fire stopped, though he didn’t let his guard down yet.

“What are they doing?” he mumbled, frowning at a readout that showed the others heading back to the castle. Shiro watched them all head in successfully, no last second attack or attempt to stop them. The frown stuck as he finally followed them in.

He found the team in a briefing room, with Allura and Coran there as well. “What are you guys doing in here? We’re not taking a break.”

“Shiro’s right,” Allura agreed. “You should be training.”

“We’ve _been_ training,” Hunk groaned. “When are we going back to Earth?”

Pidge sat up and gave him a serious look. “I’m not going back until I find my family.”

“There won’t _be_ an Earth if we don’t figure out how to fight Zarkon.” Shiro looked them all over. That little training session had taken a lot out of all of them.

“How are we going to fight? We can’t even figure out how to form Voltron,” Lance countered.

“I’m not surprised,” Coran broke in. “You know, the original paladins fought hundreds of battles together, side-by-side. They were like a pack of yalmors linked at the ears,” pulling at his own.

Shiro could see Pidge fighting not to ask what a ‘yalmor’ was while Lance just fell back on to the seat. 

“Yeah, that’s definitely not us.” Lance sighed.

“During the last attack, your survival instincts forced you to work as a team, but that will only get you so far. You’ll have to become a _real_ team to have any chance at forming Voltron, and beating Zarkon next time,” Coran advised. He brightened up with a sudden idea. “You should try working out on the training deck!”

Hunk let out another groan. “There’s a training deck?”

“Of course there is! The paladins needed to keep in tip-top shape between battles. Follow me, and I’ll show you where we’ll be putting you all through your paces.” The older man paused for a moment, looking at them all. “Just a tour today. But tomorrow, bright and early, you’ll all be in there for an intense training session!”

“But Coran-” Allura tried to break in, probably to push them to do some of this training that day, but Coran shook his head. Shiro was too far away on the other side of the room to hear their hurriedly whispered conversation, but whatever Coran said won the princess over. “I suppose… Yes, tomorrow I expect you all to report to the training deck. Coran, show them the way.”

“Chop chop, get a move on!” Coran clapped his hands while most of the paladins followed after him with sighs and eyerolls. 

Shiro brought up the rear. His mind was fuzzy with thoughts, making it hard to focus. He could keep going. The exercise outside had taken a lot of mental energy, but he hadn’t hit rock bottom yet. He could push himself and somehow he knew that the presence would help, at least by not getting in his way and distracting him. Surely the others could keep going, too-

“You know, for a weird old man, he’s pretty smart.” Keith spoke up, forcing Shiro out of his daze.

“What?”

Keith walked next to him, having fallen back from his previous position. “Coran. He can tell they’re not up to it.” Shiro saw him glance up, start to say something, and then press his lips together instead.

Shiro wanted to press him on that but he didn’t want to push Keith into a fight. Not then. “What about you? Are you up to it?” 

He only got a shrug in reply. “Guess we won’t find out until tomorrow.”

*

Keith sat outside the training room in his armor. It was still early, and even Shiro wasn’t there yet. Surprising, Keith thought, since Shiro seemed so dead set on training the day before. He tapped his wrist and a small screen popped up.

“Just like Pidge promised.” The youngest paladin had spent most of the day, after training was postponed, working with Coran to open up the smallest stable wormhole possible close to Earth. The reason? To steal some bandwidth so they could attempt to access the internet. It was slow, and they couldn’t actually communicate with anyone, but it worked. If they were still back home, and Pidge didn’t look, like, twelve, Keith would offer to buy him a six pack.

Keith looked up and down the hall, making sure Shiro wasn’t on his way, and pulled up an online encyclopedia. He typed in his search: post traumatic stress disorder. A page popped up immediately – well, as immediately as this slow as hell connection would allow. He felt his eyebrows knit together in a frown as he scanned through the information. 

“Keith? You’re up early.”

“Shiro!” Keith quickly tapped the screen away. “Ah… yeah. I haven’t gotten used to the time change yet.”

Shiro sat down on the other side of the hall across from him. “Better than being late, I guess.” The quiet in the hallway stretched out, and Shiro leaned his head back against the wall behind him. Keith considered bringing up his concern for Shiro when a mumble interrupted his thoughts.

“Could you just leave me alone for one fucking day?” Shiro’s eyes were closed and his face was tightened up in a frown.

“H-hey. Shiro? You okay?” Keith felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It was an echo of the feeling he got when he first saw Shiro’s new arm. Who was he talking to?

Shiro sat up and cleared his throat. “I’m fine. Sorry. Just. Thinking out loud.”

Keith didn’t believe him for a second. He searched Shiro’s face, noticing that he didn’t meet his eyes. After a few more moments, he let his eyes move away. This might be more serious than he thought.

He kept his thoughts to himself when the others finally showed up. Shiro seemed completely back to normal, joking around and congratulating Lance for being on time. If Keith wasn’t paying close attention he would have missed the small signs that something really was off. The way Shiro kept clenching and relaxing his right hand. How he would turn his head and his lips would just barely move, like he was whispering to someone over his shoulder. It unnerved Keith and put him on edge but did his best to keep his cool.

Coran only showed up once everyone else was there, quickly ushering them all into the large room. He directed them from a room above the large training deck. 

“One, two. One, two. Can you all hear me down there?” Keith gave a thumbs up towards the upper room, and the others quickly followed. “All right, listen up. The paladin code demands you put your team members’ safety above your own. A swarm of drones is about to attack!”

Coran’s sudden change in volume made Keith flinch, and he saw Shiro react just as badly. Before he could get his mind back on the present, a hatch opened on one of the training room’s walls and spherical drones poured out to surround the paladins.

“It’s up to each of you to do everything you can to protect the other members of your team.” 

The drones closed in, flying around in formation. As they got closer, a shield – smaller but very much like the one Keith got when he first received his bayard – appeared over his right arm. A quick glance to either side showed everyone else had one as well.

“Get ready.” Shiro’s voice sounded more ready and confident than it had any other time that morning. 

The shots started without warning. When Hunk ducked out of the way of a laser beam and it hit Pidge instead, Keith could have sworn that the smaller paladin just disappeared. He was too focused on the drones to be able to find out what exactly happened. 

“Protect your teammates, or no one will be there to protect you!” Coran warned.

Shortly after that, Hunk was gone, too, and Keith was forced back-to-back with Shiro and Lance.

“Good work!” Keith hoped that Coran’s encouragement over the speakers meant they were done. “Time to increase intensity.” Oh.

The drones spun around them, moving faster and shooting faster, too. Trying to keep the beams from hitting himself or the other two was more difficult now and there was no way Keith could keep his eyes on all the drones as they flew around them.

“You keeping up over there, Keith?” Lance quipped.

“Just concentrate on keeping me safe,” Keith retorted right back.

Lance scoffed and just that sound grated on Keith’s nerves. “Me? I own this drill. You’re the one that needs to concentrate.”

“If you have time to banter, _neither_ of you are concentrating!” Shiro interrupted briskly. 

The drones shifted their formation and pivoted downwards. Keith knelt down, keeping his shield on the same level as the shooting drones. He assumed the others did the same, until a stinging laser beam shot through his armor and the floor dropped out from under him.

“Fuck!”

Keith landed in a pit of foam cubes and watched the hole he fell through close up above him. “Ugh…”

On the wall was a monitor showing Shiro and Lance, and it was clearly Lance who hadn’t paying attention. 

“Son of a bitch.”

It only took a few more seconds for Lance to drop down with him, and with no more teammates to help him out, Shiro was in the foam pit right after.

Coran’s groan echoed through the now empty training room.

“So…” Lance struggled out of the pit and sat on the edge. “You think we did good?”

*

Shiro stepped out of the control room with a sigh. His right arm still felt like shocks of electricity were still running through it, even though Pidge had give directions well enough for him to only run into the walls once. Having to coax Hunk to make any movements at all while feeling like that had been a real test of patience.

He was still flexing his right hand when the now familiar, almost constant, hunger caused his stomach to growl. 

“Ugh… already?” Shiro thought his goo breakfast would have held him over for at least a little longer. He was beginning to think maybe he should ask for advice from Coran, or maybe peek into the room with the healing pods to look for some sort of diagnostic equipment. There was so much of his memory that was still clouded. Maybe he had picked up something while he was a prisoner and didn’t remember it. A sickness that was leaving him deficient in something, or maybe a parasite – 

His tingling right hand clenched painfully and Shiro felt a flash of hot anger from the presence following him. 

“Fine, fine!” Shiro forced his hand open and glanced around to make sure no one was close by. “Not a parasite. Calm down.” 

Presence seemingly appeased, Shiro felt another sigh forcing its way out of his mouth. He hadn’t missed the way Keith looked at him the morning before. Voicing his thoughts aloud felt natural. Keeping himself from speaking to his new shadow was somehow _wrong._ But why?

In any case, it was something he would have to work on, Shiro told himself. Somehow he ended up in charge, leading this small group of fighters that was supposed to save the universe. Even if he was losing it he had to at least _appear_ to be keeping it together.

Shiro’s thoughts were still jumbled by the time he made his way to the closest approximation of a kitchen that the castle had. It didn’t occur to him that he was still in his armor as he dispensed a serving of green goo into a bowl. 

“Shiro? What are you doing in here?” Pidge peeked into the room with a confused frown, and Shiro whipped around with a spoon in his mouth like he’d been caught sneaking into the pantry as a kid. “We’re all watching Keith try to get Lance through the maze and Hunk thought you would get a kick out of it.”

“Oh, sure.” Shiro wolfed down the goo as fast as he could, doing his best to ignore the startled and slightly disgusted look on Pidge’s face. 

“Gross. Do you actually like that stuff?” she asked.

“No, but it’s definitely not the worst I’ve ever had.” Shiro didn’t quite remember _exactly_ what he’d been forced to live on while he was a prisoner, but he had a distinct feeling that whatever it was made the goo seem like a meal from a five-star restaurant.

Pidge’s hijacked drone joined them while they made their way back to the training room. She snagged it out of the air and flipped it over, ignoring frantic beeps and whistles as she checked some of the alien electronics. After a few moments of silence while Shiro wondered if there was anything in the surrounding area that could be hunted or fished, _anything_ to break up the monotony of food goo, Pidge spoke up.

“Um. I…” Shiro glanced over while she kept her eyes on Rover. “You were on that ship with my dad and brother for a while, right?”

“Yep. Nothing but them for company for the trip out to Kerberos.” He kept his answer short, letting Pidge lead the conversation.

“Did they ever… talk about back home?” Pidge kept her gaze on Rover as she let it go to float next to her shoulder.

Shiro nodded, with an idea of what this might be about. “Sometimes. It was always kind of up to chance if talking about home would make us homesick or feel better, so it didn’t come up often. Why do you ask?”

Pidge took a breath to answer but was interrupted by the sounds of Lance and Keith arguing, growing suddenly louder as they rounded the corner to the training room doors.

“You were doing that on purpose!” Lance shoved Keith across the hall, making him stumble back into the opposite wall.

“I was _not. You_ weren’t following my directions!” Keith shouted back once he got back to his feet.

“Those ‘directions’ didn’t make any fucking sense!”

Shiro saw Keith reach behind him for his knife and knew he couldn’t try to let them work it out for themselves. He ran forward to break up the fight – but Hunk, who had been standing close by, took action first.

“Whoa! I don’t think so.” Hunk grabbed Keith from and pinned his arms against his body, lifting him up in what could have been an enthusiastic hug in any other circumstance.

Shiro paused at the sight before pivoting to Lance and pushing him back from the scene of the fight. 

“What the hell is going on here!” he demanded.

“Motherfucker – let me go!” Keith kicked and struggled uselessly Hunk’s arms. Clearly he wasn’t going to answer.

Shiro turned to Lance instead, using his height to look down on him and practically pin him in place. “What. Happened.” Lance opened his mouth to argue, but it snapped shut when he met Shiro’s eyes. 

“I swear he was running me into the walls of that maze on purpose. It fucking hurt!” Lance leaned around Shiro to glare at Keith. “Dick.”

“Nope, you’re talking to me, not him.” Shiro took a step to the side to block his view. “Are you serious? That is the reason you were going to try to kill each other?”

Lance crossed his arms, looking to the side. “Well it sounds _stupid_ when you say it like that.”

Shiro pinched the bridge of his nose. “Pidge, take Lance somewhere. Anywhere. I don’t care.” He turned to Hunk and Keith, who was still now. “Hunk, let Keith go. I’ll take him. You go with Pidge and Lance.”

Hunk carefully lowered Keith to the ground and let him go slowly. He backed away before finally relaxing. Shiro thought he looked like he had caught a tiger by the tail and lived to tell about it.

Shiro grabbed Keith by the shoulder, probably a little tighter than necessary, to march him away from the source of his anger before Lance tried to start anything else. Both of them were silent until they made it outside, standing in the cool shadow of the castle and looking out over the cliff that fell into the sea. Shiro’s grip had softened by then and he let his hand fall down.

“What happened back there?” he asked, voice soft but still clearly exasperated. 

“Lance started it.” Keith turned away and crossed his arms. 

“Lance likes to start lots of things. That doesn’t tell me what happened.” Shiro waited, staring out over the water. He could just barely make out the sound of waves at the base of the cliff when the wind blew just right.

It took a minute or two for Keith to speak and by that time Shiro had sat down, closing his eyes and thankful that his shadow was just watching curiously for now.

“I really was trying to help.” Keith sat down next to him and picked a slender blade of grass to play with. “He wasn’t listening. He kept telling me to give him directions some other way but there _wasn’t_ another way to give them.” 

“And you let him goad you into almost stabbing him?”

“I wasn’t actually gonna stab him!” Keith threw his hands up and then flopped backwards to lay spread-eagle on the grass. “I was just gonna make him shut up.”

Shiro snorted. “Okay. New rule. Just between you and me. No using that knife on your teammates.”

“Can I punch him?”

“Only if he gets to punch you back.”

Keith groaned but at least he was in a better mood, the tiniest of smiles tugging at his lips. 

“I’m going back inside. You take as long as you need out here.” Shiro stood up with a sigh. He felt a wave of exhaustion wash over him but he powered through it, stretching out his back and standing up straight. “I’ll go give Lance a talking to. He gets the same punch rule as you do. It’s only fair.”

Keith laughed and waved him off, and Shiro finally went inside. If the Galra didn’t kill him, he thought to himself, keeping this team together would.

*

Shiro stood with the others in the command room, unable to focus on anything in front of him. Coran was giving them a rundown of the day’s training plans but everything he said went in one ear and out the other. His head felt like it was full of white noise and static and what little clear space for thought he could make was filled with hyper-awareness of the presence watching him and his thoughts.

“Shiro?” He snapped out of his daze when Coran stood in front of him, a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right? I know you’ve been through quite a lot lately. If you need someone to speak with…”

“We’re fine,” Shiro said quickly, shrugging off his hand. “Just taking a bit to wake up, that’s all.” He vaguely remembered Coran saying they would be doing some flight exercises and used that to his advantage. “I better get to my lion before the others wonder where I am.”

He heard Coran try to stop him, but pretended he didn’t hear. 

Shiro didn’t relax until he was seated in the black lion’s cockpit. Their spirit caused the other presence to fade somewhat and helped clear his mind. 

“Let’s do a couple warm-up laps and then we’ll get started,” Shiro announced to the team. The black lion purred and stretched as he started up the console, and their good mood was contagious. By the time they were in the air he felt more like himself than he had all morning.

“You’ll never be able to form Voltron unless each of you has a strong bond with your lion,” Coran stated, getting them ready for that morning’s routine. 

“No problem.” Of course Lance would mouth off. Shiro found himself grinning, waiting to hear what bullshit he would spout this time. “Me and Blue are best buds for life, for real.”

“Perfect! Then you won’t have any issues with this exercise,” Coran told him. “Everyone, put your lions into a nose dive!”

Shiro did as he was instructed, glancing at their altitude. It had taken some time to convert most of the numbers and measurements to ones they could understand, but at least now he could see they were a little more than ten kilometers over the surface. Cruising altitude for a commercial plane back on Earth, but that didn’t matter much to alien spacecraft that could fly faster than light.

The artificial gravity in the cockpit didn’t stop Shiro from feeling the drop in his stomach as lion started to descend faster. He could feel adrenaline pump through him, and it tempted his shadow out of hiding.

“This is an expert-level drill that you really shouldn’t attempt until you’ve been flying for years, but uh… we’re in a bit of a rush, so here we go.”

Shiro got a sinking feeling that wasn’t just from the sudden drop in altitude.

“Activating training helmets!”

With no more warning than that, the visor of Shiro’s helmet blacked out and blinded him almost completely. He could hear the alarm from the others through his headset; clearly everyone was having the same experience.

“You must learn to see through your lions’ eyes,” Coran told them. “The goal is to pull up right before you crash into the ground. Feel what the lion feels!”

Shiro closed his eyes. He took a slow breath, trying not to think about the ground getting closer and closer. It took a conscious effort but he was able to ignore the voices coming through his headset and focus on his lion. He imagined his mind expanding with each breath out until it included the entire gigantic machine around him. Even if he couldn’t complete the exercise, he _knew_ they wouldn’t let him get hurt. Shiro leaned into that feeling, a trust he hadn’t felt in a long time, and then something _clicked._

For just a moment Shiro could see all of them. There he was, of course. A dark shadow stood behind him, a reflection of his own form but smoky and featureless other than a pair of glowing white eyes. Like this he could clearly see them somehow sharing his right arm though they were still separate. And over them all was the black lion, enormous even in the strange imaginary world they were in. 

The vision lasted only a moment before the lion, clearly feminine now that he was sensing her so clearly for the first time, enveloped him. When Shiro opened his eyes, instead of seeing the black visor obstructing his vision he was able to see the landscape just starting to close in. Maneuvering the black lion felt more instinctual than ever before, pulling up just before they hit the ground and flying through a narrow canyon. Dodging rock formations and flying through arches of stone felt like playing a game and the joy from his lion was unmistakable.

Shiro grinned as he perched his lion at the edge of a cliff, the castle just barely visible on the horizon. “So how’d we do?” He blinked a few times as his visor became clear again; his vision was doubled for a moment before he was seeing through just his own eyes again.

“Er… _you_ certainly did well,” Coran said. “Go ahead and round everyone up before coming back in. I think Pidge and Hunk are still digging Keith out of that dune…”

He was in too much of a good mood to let his team’s nonsense get him down and was soon headed to the cluster of markers on his map a few kilometers away. Besides, it was better to focus on them than let his mind wander to what he saw and think about what his right arm _really_ was.

*

_There are two halves to my pilot._

_Perhaps ‘halves’ is too simple. Each part of my pilot is an individual that can exist on their own, and yet together they make up a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts._

_One piece, still imprisoned behind trauma and pain, is scared of me. They are able to sense my presence more intuitively than their host, their other half. If only I could explain that the protection I offer to that host extends to them…_

_Red interrupts my thoughts, still shaking sand out of her joints._

_My bearings are going to get scratched. Those take forever to autorepair. She sits down next to me in the hangar. _

_**You could have taken control. There was no need to crash the way you did.** _

_Red’s tail lashes; she always had a temper but has picked up a new volatility from her current pilot. I wasn’t going to lose._

_Too bad you lost anyway. Blue saunters past us as she gloats. It is not hard to miss the sand that falls to the ground with each step she takes._

_Neither of you won. Don’t you remember having to get help to get out of the dunes? Always curious, it is no surprise that Green was listening in, even as she explores the darker corners of the hangar._

_Neither Red nor Blue reply. Quiet amusement from Yellow echoes my own. Never one to go out of her way if it wasn’t necessary, her habit of staying where her pilot left her last hasn’t changed._

_Are you done worrying about your pilot yet? Red asks, switching to a private channel to speak._

_I growl a warning but she doesn’t move. **What is wrong with worrying? They are suffering, and with our bond so weak, I cannot do anything to help if they are not flying with me.**_

_Red does not reply. I know she worries as well. Our pilots have a past together, a connection that draws us closer than we would be normally._

_ Maybe we can do something about that. _

_I look over as she twitches a paw, expanding some of her seams to get more sand from her joints. **What would you suggest?**_

_There is one here, the one supervising our pilots in their training. We could recommend a course of action to him, she says, sending millennia-old images of our previous pilots sleeping in the cockpits. Something to help deepen our bonds, that we could also try to help work on communication. Red looks up and I can easily sense the pride in her at the idea forming so quickly._

_**And in the process we might allay fear and worry.** I nudge her with my snout and we go back to our public channel. **An excellent idea. Run it by the others and then we can work out a means of sending the message.**_

_Red can easily do that from where she is now, but as always, she is a lion of action, running to find the others to ask them in person._

_I relax back into a power-conserving state. We cannot make a decision or form a plan until the others are informed, and I wish to be in the best condition for my pilot for our next mission._

_Soon enough I will be able to help my pilot. Until then, I must wait._

*

“How much longer am I going to have to wait!?” 

Keith paused outside of the dining area when he heard Pidge’s voice. He sounded upset, and Keith didn’t really feel like getting in the middle of it.

“Those prisoners have been abused for years, Pidge.” Coran’s voice was firm as he replied. “There’s chronic physical issues that need treatment, malnutrition and wounds that never got a chance to heal for as long as they were held as by the Galra. Even though it’s possible to heal them faster, it would put stress on their bodies and minds that are already at their limits. You just have to wait.”

“This is bullshit!” Pidge stomped towards the door and Keith took a few steps back so he could pretend he was only just walking up. The younger paladin shoved past him, and Keith thought he could see him wiping away tears as he ran off. 

Coran was leaning against the table, rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. As soon as he noticed Keith walk in he straightened up and put on his usual cheerful attitude. 

“Ah! Good morning, Keith. Are you ready for today’s training?”

“Yeah, I guess.” He sat down at the table and picked up a bar of something that looked like some kind of lime and strawberry dessert. He took a nibble and almost spat it back out; it was just the same food goo as before but in a new shape and texture. 

“I’ve been working on repairing the nutrition production machine!” Coran said proudly, while Keith made himself eat. “I promise we Altaens have better taste in food than we’ve been giving you.”

“Sure.” Keith knew he shouldn’t butt into Pidge’s business, but he couldn’t get it out of his head how upset he was. “Is Pidge okay?” he finally let himself ask.

Coran’s cheery mood slipped once again and he sighed. “The prisoners we rescued from the Galra battleship are still recovering, but he wants to interview them.” 

That was all Coran felt the need to share, and all Keith felt comfortable asking about. It drew too many parallels to his own past that he didn’t want to think about.

The dining area got more lively as everyone else showed up, most of them still in pajamas or casual clothes. After living alone for so long – though Keith wasn’t sure if that was actually the problem or he was just using it as an excuse – the noise and movement of so many people was almost overstimulating. The last person to show up was Shiro, fully kitted out and in his armor. He watched as he grabbed a stack of the food bars, said a few quiet words to Coran, and quickly left.

Keith took one more bar for the road before going to get dressed for training, an idea slowly forming in his mind. Maybe if he couldn’t bring up PTSD to Shiro, he could ask Coran. After Shiro he was the next person he would trust with that kind of information. Keith was still turning the thought over when he met everyone else in the training room.

“No helmets for this one,” Coran directed, walking in with a box in his arms. He had them all sit down in a circle and handed out weird headsets. “Put these on and try to relax. I’ll direct you from upstairs.”

Keith looked at the headset from a few different angles. Nothing about it looked very interesting. Just flexible plastic with soft padding. He put it on and heard a soft whine of electricity before it quickly faded. Seated to his right, he saw Shiro wince at the same noise when he put his on, too. What exactly was Coran going to have them do? 

“The most important part of paladin training is being able to meld your minds and focus on one thing: Voltron. Everything else has to fade away.”

After the chaos of that morning, it was a relief for Keith to close his eyes and focus on Coran’s voice. He took slow deep breaths and concentrated on his role: Voltron – and essentially Shiro’s – right hand.

“This technique will be essential every time you form Voltron. So, relax and open your mind. No walls, no secrets between paladins.”

Keith tensed up and the calm breathing caught in his throat. No secrets? He didn’t want the other paladins in his head and he definitely didn’t want to be in theirs. For just a moment, he cracked an eye open to see what was going on.

Projected in front of him was a view of his desert shack of a home, and the slight hill where he had found Shiro watching the sunrise. Where he had decided to show him why he had stayed out in the desert instead of run off somewhere, anywhere else. Everyone else had the same small projections in front of them as well. 

Of course he turned his attention to Shiro. The floating scene in front of him was faded and blurred until it suddenly flared into brilliant and glaring color, sharp and contrasted. An alien with multiple eyes was pinned at the neck with a black hand. As soon as Keith realized what he was looking at, the hand turned sharp and clawed and a splash of bright orange blood sprayed across the screen. It cut off to static and a still view of a shuttle bay replaced it.

Keith was shaken; Shiro didn’t even seem to realize what he had projected. He killed someone, and the view before it cut off looked like he was moving in to bite at the wound. What had happened to Shiro while he was a prisoner on that ship?

Coran’s voice cut through his disturbed thoughts and brought him back to the current activity. “...clear everything. Now, focus on forming your lion.”

It took more effort than Keith was willing to admit to close his eyes and focus like he was supposed to have been doing the entire time. Red was easy to steer his thoughts to once he put his mind to it, though, and he did his best to rejoin the activity.

“Bring your lions together and form Voltron. Keep your minds open, work together. Good!”

At that point it more felt like Coran was hindering his concentration, but Keith powered through it. He began to feel the same sense of connection as the first time they formed the giant robot.

“Keep focusing! Only one to go!” 

Keith was more than ready to get Coran to just shut up, and he opened an eye in irritation to find out why they couldn’t just finish this already. Nearly across from him, on the other side of Shiro, Pidge was still struggling. A blurry view of the same photo Hunk pulled out of his stuff when they first met, what felt like a lifetime ago back on Earth, was trying to materialize in front of him.

“Pidge, stop thinking of your girlfriend!” Keith barked.

“I wasn’t! Hunk was rooting around in my head!” He glared over at Hunk, who just half-shrugged.

“I was not. Not on purpose anyway. Besides, I thought we were open. You can look in my head hole.” 

“Everyone has to be able to look in everyone’s head holes,” Coran interrupted, and Keith felt his frustration starting to rise into anger. “Clear your minds!”

Keith forced his annoyance back down as he closed his eyes once again. The connection between them all formed once again, and this time it felt more complete and like it was supposed to. 

“Good… Almost there… Now form Voltron!” Coran sounded excited, and Keith felt the same emotion radiating from the others. It was only a matter of time, now – and then Keith felt like he had walked into a brick wall.

“Pidge!” Lance was the one who got on to the younger paladin this time, and Keith opened his eyes in time to watch Pidge yank the headset off and toss it across the open training room.

“I’m done with this!” He crossed his arms and avoided looking at anyone. “Look, I don’t like everyone grubbing around in my head.”

Shiro looked up from where he was sitting, and Keith saw there wasn’t any frustration or anger in his expression, just disappointment. “Oh, come on, Pidge. We’re starting to get the hang of this.”

“I’m just… I’m just tired, okay?”

“Okay.” Shiro nodded with a little sigh. “Let’s take a break,” he said, turning to everyone else.

Keith pulled the headset off with a groan. “So I guess nothing is going to go right. Perfect. Amazing.” Shiro gave him a look, and Keith threw his hands up but shut his mouth. 

With the headset gone, the sense of connection between Keith and the others was instantly severed. It left an aching loneliness in his chest for just a brief moment, so short he almost questioned if he felt it at all. 

Eventually everyone relaxed after Pidge’s outburst and Coran came in with his arms full of what appeared to be… juice pouches? Keith accepted one with a nod of thanks and was pleased to find it full of fizzy cold water. 

“You all _have_ been working hard. Maybe it’s time to relax a little,” Coran allowed.

Keith scooted just a little bit closer to Shiro, who took a sip of the water and looked disappointed that it wasn’t artificially flavored fruit juice in the drink pouch. 

“Those headset things were pretty weird, huh?” he started.

Shiro looked up and nodded. “Tell me about it. As if I didn’t already have enough going on in my head right now,” he murmured wryly.

“When you you put it on, did you – did you see…” Keith hesitantly started to ask about the gruesome scene projected from Shiro’s mind before he was interrupted by Allura. She stepped into the training room, dressed in her paladin-like armor. 

“What are you doing lying around? You’re supposed to be training!” She looked down at them sitting on the floor, hands on her hips. 

“Just resting a bit,” Coran said, defending them. “You know, you can’t push _too_ hard.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t push too hard?’” Allura’s look turned to a glare directed at everyone. “Get up, you lazy lumps! It’s time you faced the gladiator!”

Keith met eyes with the others, all of who were reluctant to be the first to move. Finally Allura walked up to Lance, the one seated closest to her, and grabbed the back of his collar. She yanked him to his feet and scowled at the rest of them, daring them to make her pick them up as well. Keith gulped down the rest of his water and tossed the empty container at Lance – it wasn’t a punch, this was allowed, right? - before he got up and held his hand out to Shiro. 

Shiro grasped his outstretched hand and hopped to his feet. “You think you can handle this?” he teased Keith, and gave his hand a squeeze before letting go.

“I know I can. Can you?” Keith looked up to met Shiro’s eyes and found his breath catching again. Something in taller man’s gaze was dangerous, wildly ferocious in a way that Keith had never seen before. Just like the scene from Shiro’s mind, it was gone almost before he realized what he was seeing.

Keith pulled his bayard off his hip and gripped it tightly. If he wasn’t sure about it before, he was now. _Something_ had happened to Shiro while he was missing. Something had _changed_ him. But what?

Coran wished them all luck and headed back up to the control room. With a flick of his wrist, Keith made his bayard transform, swinging it through the air to get used to it’s odd weightlessness. He put on his helmet and tried to prepare himself but was distracted again by Shiro.

Not too far away, Shiro held his right arm away from his body. His eyes were closed and a troubled expression forced his face into a frown. Keith watched him grimace as something black and viscous oozed out from under the armor of his right arm, crawling up to his shoulder and leaving it ink-black and slick like the bare ‘skin’ of his prosthetic. With a flex of his hand, the ends of his fingers spiked into vicious claws.

Keith let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding when Shiro opened his eyes again. ‘What the fuck’ was the only thing he was able to think over and over, missing whatever Coran was saying as it went in one ear and out the other.

The whoosh of some kind of hatch opening in the ceiling finally brought Keith back to his senses. A huge robot, taller than Shiro and with a staff as tall as them in their hands, dropped from the opening and landed with ease on the training room floor.

Hunk, surprisingly, was the first to take action. Unfortunately Keith ended up in the crossfire as he heaved around his laser-firing minigun of a bayard. Throwing up his arm to protect himself and forming the shield on his left arm only got him nearly thrown to the ground from the force of the shots. By the time he was steady on his feet again, Hunk was down and out and Pidge was the next one under attack.

Pidge’s small bayard did little more than deflect the blows from the bot. By the time Keith, Lance, and Shiro moved in to help, he was knocked out in a pile with Hunk.

Keith approached more cautiously after that while Lance lay down some covering fire. Or at least, that’s what he was _trying_ to do until the bot knocked his bayard out of his hands. Keith winced at the impacts of the bot’s staff on Lance’s head, even softened by the helmet. He didn’t get much chance to feel sympathy as the bot pivoted around to attack him; as soon as Keith thought he had warded off the staff, Lance was swung around and launched into him.

It took Keith a moment to realize why he was sprawled out on the floor. Shiro – the bot would be after Shiro next. Keith forced himself to his feet. Shiro had his arm pulled back like he was about to slash at the bot, but he froze. The robot leapt up, ready to bring their staff down on Shiro, at the same time that Keith propelled himself across the training room. The impact of the staff on his bayard made his hands tingle painfully, but at least he had managed to get there in time. 

Shiro hadn’t moved from behind him yet. Keith risked a glance over his shoulder to see him still, almost slumped over and staring at nothing.

“Shiro! Are you okay?” 

He didn’t answer. 

Taking his attention off the robot was a mistake. Keith’s grip on his bayard keeping the lightning-quick staff at bay slipped and before he knew it, his feet had been knocked out from under him and he was launched into Shiro much like Lance had been thrown into him.

Keith groaned as he groped his hand blindly around the floor for his bayard. His hand just closed around the handle when there was a buzz of mechanical parts powering down and the bot crashed to the ground. Allura stood in its place, scowling down at them with obvious contempt.

“That combat simulator was set at a level fit for an Altean child! You’re not even _close_ to working as a team, let alone ready to face Zarkon!” She tossed her head with a scoff. “Clean yourselves up and report to Coran in an hour,” Allura demanded. She stalked out of the training room without another word.

*

Once out of the training room, and away from anyone else, Shiro leaned against the wall and put a trembling hand to his head. He had frozen again, and this time put Keith in danger. Why couldn’t he get over _whatever_ this was? He didn’t even remember most of what happened while he was a prisoner, so why was it still tormenting him?

Part of him was waiting for his shadow to pester or harass him in his troubled state, but for once he had to search for their presence. It was almost as if they were hiding from him, afraid to make him feel worse than he already was…

Shiro wasn’t sure how long it took him to feel even slightly back to normal. When he pulled himself back to reality, he was surprised to see Keith leaning on the wall across from him, arms crossed and eyes closed.

“Keith?” Shiro straightened up off the wall.

“Back to Earth, huh? Or… whatever this place is, I guess.” Keith mirrored his movement, though he kept his arms crossed. 

“What are you doing here?” He couldn’t keep the confusion out of his voice.

Keith frowned, looking at him sideways. “You ran off as soon as Allura left. I saw you freeze when that training robot attacked you. Why wouldn’t I be worried?”

“Oh. Right.” Shiro winced. “You don’t have to worry about it, though, I’m-”

“You’re not fine!” Keith interrupted him, uncrossing his arms and taking an aggressive step forward. Shiro didn’t feel any alarm – he didn’t think he could ever be scared of Keith – but it was still a relief when he stopped himself and slowed down. He didn’t think he would be able to deal with calming Keith down from an angry outburst.

“You’re not fine,” he started again, quieter and calmer. “You don’t have to tell me what happened, or if you even remember yet. But you can’t just pretend everything is _normal,_ Shiro.” Keith searched Shiro’s face while his own expression softened. “Even I know right now isn’t a good time for it, but maybe when things calm down and we get some kind of break, you… you can find somebody to talk to about everything, maybe get some help.”

Shiro knew, he _knew,_ that Keith only meant well. That didn’t stop his mind from racing forward. Telling someone about what few memories he had of his time in captivity, trying to explain what he thought his right arm might be – like being put under a microscope, studied, examined – 

“No!” Shiro didn’t realize he had backed away from Keith until he hit the wall behind him. His right hand tightened painfully into a fist as his shadow’s presence barreled into the forefront of his consciousness. He didn’t want to go through the imagined scenario, and his shadow was even more anathematic.

“We’re _fine,”_ he hissed out through clenched teeth. “We don’t need any help.” Shiro turned away before he could see the expression on Keith’s face. “We… I’ll meet you with the others.” He quickly walked off, doing his best to deny that he wasn’t running away.

Shiro didn’t stop walking until he found himself in the hangar and looking up at his lion. Now that the anger and fear was gone, he couldn’t feel anything but shame and disappointment at his outburst at Keith. He noticed the conspicuous silence from his shadow as well.

He was startled out of his thoughts when the lion’s eyes glowed to life and she tilted her massive head to look down at him. Shiro started to take a step back to make more room until he saw how delicate her movements were. The black lion was humongous but apparently had the ability to make minute adjustments in her posture. No matter how she was able to move, though, it didn’t take away from the judgmental growl she let out once she met Shiro’s eyes.

“I know… we shouldn’t have reacted like that.” Shiro looked away as he felt his face heat up. “Even with the _help_ I had getting worked up,” Shiro huffed, looking down at his right arm, “I still need to apologize. And… and maybe I _do_ need to find someone to talk to,” he said, ending in a whisper. He was surprised again when he felt the cold metal of the black lion’s snout just barely bump against his forehead. 

Understanding and forgiveness washed over Shiro, though underneath it all was a warning to take better care of both himself and his teammates. 

“Right. I need to be better for them, too.” Shiro reached up and placed his hand on the lion. A moment later she powered down again, eyes going dark. “Thank you,” he added quietly.

Shiro stayed in the present as he made his way back to the main floor of the castle. Words of apology tried to form themselves in his mind, but the worry that Keith might not accept them kept interrupting his script. When he heard the others talking, gathered around the entrance to a large dining room for some reason, he could have sworn he his lion sending him encouragement.

Keith was being his usual self, standing awkwardly away from the others. That made it easier for Shiro to approach him while doing his best to ignore the puzzled looks from the others.

“Shiro, I’m sorry-”

“I’m sorry-”

They both interrupted each other and Shiro tried to keep the shock out of his expression. “What? What are _you_ apologizing for?”

“I shouldn’t be giving advice like I did. I don’t know what you went through, so I don’t know what you need-”

Shiro shook his head, a wry grin working its way across his face. “You’re still right. I… I need someone to talk to. Maybe not right now, but…” He sighed and the grin faded. “I do need help,” he forced out. “And I am sorry. We just… got caught off guard. That doesn’t mean I had to take it out on you.”

Keith snorted and rolled his eyes. “Whatever. As if I haven’t said worse and you acted like nothing happened. I think you get a pass.”

They met eyes again, though before Shiro could try to say anything else, Coran interrupted him.

“Are we finally all here? Go ahead and come on in!” he said, poking his head through the door.

Shiro followed Keith into the large dining room, but still somehow ended up right next to the head of the table next to the place setting for Allura. The room had enough space for several more tables of the same size and the walls had subtle joints that Shiro could just barely make out. He guessed they could either retract or slide out of the way to make the room even bigger.

“I know there’s been a little… trouble focusing on forming Voltron,” Coran said diplomatically. “So I’ve whipped you all up a big batch of focusing food!” With the press of a button at the head of the table, the tabletop slid open and a veritable spread of food goo and bars rose to the surface. “After this, you’ll be forming Voltron six times a day!”

As if on cue, Shiro’s stomach rumbled. He didn’t really find this appetizing, and neither did his shadow that grumbled at the back of his mind, but they were both hungry. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Hunk rubbing his hands together; at least _somebody_ was excited to eat.

“Smells great, Coran,” Shiro said. “Thanks.” He did his best to keep the weariness of the day out of his voice but it still bled through.

Shiro had just picked up his spoon when he saw Coran gesture dramatically out of the corner of his eye. By the time he realized what was happening, both his wrists were cuffed – his left was trapped on the arm of his chair and his right was linked with Hunk’s. Sudden claustrophobia threatened to send him into a panic attack as he realized he was captured. Repressed memories tried to float to the surface until a surge of anger from his shadow helped him ride through the terror.

It all passed in a split second. Shiro’s heart pounded hard enough he could feel it through his whole body.

“Hey, what the fuck!” Lance was the first to react once everyone figured out what was going on.

“I saw a lot of solid individual performances over the last few days, but you’re still struggling to work as a team.” Coran looked up and down the table. “So, welcome to the final bonding exercise of the day.”

Hunk pulled on both of his restraints; Shiro heard Lance protest on the other side of him before he felt a tug on his own wrist. Unfortunately, Shiro was in no mood to mess around. He didn’t yank his arm back like Lance, but he also didn’t let Hunk drag him around, either.

“Coran.” Hunk looked over at the one responsible. “I want you to think about what you’re doing.”

“This one’s a classic,” Coran said, ignoring him. “You get to feed each other. Like a pack of yalmors!”

“We don’t even know what a yalmor is!” Pidge complained from the far end of the table. 

Coran opened his mouth to answer when Allura finally joined them, dressed in her familiar blue gown. “You’re just in time, Princess!”

She cast a withering gaze down the table and Shiro could tell she wasn’t over their dismal performance with the training bot. “I see.” Without another word she sat down and began her own unencumbered meal.

Shiro forced his tense right hand from closing into a fist. He had to stay calm for the others, even if the restraints pulled up instincts to make him want to fight and struggle. Down the table he heard the others start to try and eat. It started out well enough, Shiro thought, but as the ‘meal’ continued it turned into chaos. No matter how he tried to get a spoon to his mouth, every attempt ended in failure. The original anger that got him through his panic at first had faded but now a new frustration was building.

“We’ve had easier meals from food that was actively running away from us,” he mumbled under his breath. The comment left his mouth before he realized what he was saying.

Next to him, Allura was only stewing in her sour mood. “Do Earthlings _ever_ stop complaining?”

Even as he was still dealing with his right arm being yanked around, Shiro had to stand up for his team, as little as the word ‘team’ applied to them at the moment.

“Can’t you just give us a break? Everyone’s been working hard the last couple of days.” 

“Yeah!” A few seats down, Keith stood up after hearing Shiro speak. “We’re not some prisoners for you toy with like… like…” 

“Like a bunch of toy prisoners!” Lance finished for him.

“Yes! Thank you, Lance.”

“You do _not_ yell at the princess!” Coran shouted right back.

“Oh, the princess of what?” Shiro could practically hear the eye roll in Pidge’s voice. “We’re the only ones out here and she’s no princess of ours.”

Shiro heard the splat before he understood what happened. Allura was standing with her arm outstretched after having flung a huge spoonful of green goo at Pidge.

“Go loose, Pidge,” Keith commanded. Shiro couldn’t see exactly what happened on that end of the table, but the result was clear. A plate of green goo flew through the air towards Allura, Coran shoved her chair out of the way and deflected it, and then a serving spoon filled with even more goo splattered over everyone, offending food thrower or not.

Shiro blinked goo out of his eyes. The shock of being hit with the food knocked out the anger and frustration while Hunk was the first to react.

“Oh, it’s on now.” 

The meal devolved into chaos in seconds. 

By the time there was no more food to throw, the dining area was coated in, at the very least, a thin layer of goo. Shiro wasn’t sure how some of it managed to get _under_ his armor… But he was out of breath from laughing so hard and when he turned and grinned at his teammates, they grinned right back. It only took one barely suppressed giggle from Pidge before they were all laughing again.

“Enough!” Allura’s shout silenced them all. “Do you see what you’re doing?” She looked at them all as a big smile lit up her face. “You’re finally working together as one!”

“Hey, she’s right!” Keith leaned forward enough to grin at Shiro.

“I actually don’t hate you right now,” Lance said to him, and Shiro just rolled his eyes.

Hunk nudge the Shiro and Lance. “You guys thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

“Let’s go form Voltron!” The other paladins cheered at the idea and for the first time Shiro thought they might actually have a chance to actually do it.

After a brief stop in what Shiro could only describe as a mud room to rinse off, they all headed to their lions. 

The black lion seemed ready to go, full of an excited energy Shiro hadn’t felt from her before. “Everyone ready to do this?” Shiro asked, knowing already what the answers would be.

A chorus of affirmative answers came through the headset in his helmet. Shiro felt his shadow watching as he flew his lion out of the castle. Was it… envious? He didn’t get much of a chance to think about it as the others’ lions approached and formed the giant robot with his black lion at the helm.

“We did it.” Shiro smiled to himself, a new pride for his team swelling in his chest. He closed his eyes and tried to purposefully capture a memory of the feeling. He had an inkling that things wouldn’t stay so harmonious between the paladins for very long.

*

_Kórann Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe:_

_Greetings and salutations._

_The training of our paladins is going well and clearly they are in good hands with you in command. However, we humbly request that in addition to their physical conditioning, our paladins be permitted to sleep in our cabins periodically. We believe it will improve the connections and communication between pilot and lion while also allowing us to monitor their mental health._

_Acceptance of this plan would be beneficial for all parties involved._

_Respectfully,_

_Pride Voltron_


End file.
